Product Opportunity Assessment

Product Opportunity Assessment is a structured questionnaire designed to identify good product opportunities, help with delivery focus and understand what would be required for a product to succeed in exploiting the opportunity. It can also be used to identify poor opportunities and help a product team avoid or park them, to prevent the delivery organization from wasting time.

To perform a Product Opportunity Assessment, you need to answer the following questions:

  1. Exactly what problem will this solve? (value proposition)
  2. For whom do we solve that problem? (target market)
  3. How big is the opportunity? (market size)
  4. How will we measure success? (metrics and revenue strategy)
  5. What alternatives are out there now? (competitive landscape)
  6. Why are we best suited to pursue this? (our differentiating factors)
  7. Why now? (market window)
  8. How will we get this product to market? (go-to-market strategy)
  9. What factors are critical to success? (key solution requirements)
  10. Given the above, is the recommendation go or no-go?

The Product Opportunity Assessment model was introduced by Marty Cagan in his book Inspired.

Focus on the problem, not on the solution

The Product Opportunity Assessment model is useful for evaluating problems, not for evaluating potential solutions. This is important both for clearly analysing the problem first, but also for leaving room for multiple potential solutions that could solve that problem later.

All too often what happens is that a product manager combines the problem to be solved with the solution and, when they run into difficulties with the particular solution, they abandon the opportunity.

– Marty Cagan

If the opportunity recommendation is to proceed, you can use many techniques such as Impact Estimation Tables, ICE score or similar to compare and evaluate potential solutions against the problem definition.

Cagan also specifically warns against listing features and product capabilities in the problem statement. Instead, this should be a “crisp, clear and compelling statement of the exact problem that’s being solved.” In the Value Exchange Loop terminology, that is how the product delivers value to the market.

For question 4, Cagan points out that the answer should include the exact revenue model, which is akin to a business case for the product opportunity. In the Value Exchange Loop terminology, that means that the answer to question 4 should include metrics to cover both the value delivered and the value captured.

Learn more about the Product Opportunity Assessment

Related and complementary tools to the Product Opportunity Assessment

Next article: Purpose Alignment Model