Building What Customers Need
How do you drive your product development to improve customer satisfaction and attract new customers? Simple - make sure you prioritise solving their most important problems and address the areas that they’re least satisfied with today!?
The art and science of product prioritisation can be bewildering. But if you want to take out the guesswork, be data-driven and approach it as a science - you should try opportunity scoring.?
Opportunity Scoring is part of Ulwick’s outcome-driven innovation (ODI) and is used as:
What is Opportunity Scoring?
Opportunity scoring (also known as opportunity analysis or gap analysis) is one of the best methods for helping you prioritise potential new product ideas, features, or initiatives based on how important these are to your customers and how satisfied they are with what you’re offering them today. It’s a valuable tool for product teams looking to prioritise their resources and make strategic decisions about which initiatives to pursue.?
By focusing on the initiatives that are most important to customers and have the greatest potential impact, product teams can maximise the return on their development efforts and supercharge customer satisfaction.
When is Opportunity Scoring useful to product teams?
Product teams can use opportunity scoring to prioritise their resources and make strategic decisions about which initiatives to pursue for the greatest return. It can be particularly useful in the following situations:
When there is a need to measure customers' needs : When you need to discover what’s most important to customers and address the most pressing customer experiences and journeys.?
When there are limited resources: When do we ever have unlimited resources? Seriously - in reality, opportunity scoring can help product managers identify which initiatives will have the greatest impact and prioritise resources accordingly.
When there are multiple competing initiatives: Opportunity scoring can help you decide which initiatives to pursue first.
When there is uncertainty about the potential value or feasibility of an initiative: Opportunity scoring can help product managers assess the potential impact and feasibility of an initiative and make informed decisions about whether to pursue it.
How can product managers use Opportunity Scoring?
To conduct opportunity scoring , you'll ask your customers to rate the importance and satisfaction levels of various features in your product. The features that score high in importance and low in satisfaction are the ones you should focus on improving - they represent the best opportunities for you to invest your development time and resources in.
Step-by-Step Guide to Opportunity Scoring
Identify potential opportunities: The first step in opportunity scoring is to identify potential opportunities, e.g. ideas, features, capabilities or areas of your existing or new product. Take a pragmatic approach, break down the potential opportunities into themes and areas of the products or your portfolio that make it easier for responders to understand and answer.?
Ask your customers to rate the importance and satisfaction of each opportunity: Once you have a list of opportunities, the next step is to have your customers rate their importance and satisfaction. This is usually done with a brief survey asking customers to rank each feature or outcome from 1 to 10 according to two questions:
Description of the outcome or feature
Working out the score to each opportunity: Use the following formula to work out the opportunity score.?
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Opportunity Score = importance + max(importance - satisfaction,0)
For both importance and satisfaction calculate the average for your sample.?
Excel can easily handle the ‘max’ function, where if (importance - satisfaction) is a negative number, then that part of the formula is 0.?
Understanding the score :?
When the score is greater than 10 : It is underserved. It’s important to customers, but they are not well satisfied with the products and capabilities currently available. These are great opportunities to create value.?
If the score is less than 5 : It is Overserved. The outcome is well satisfied, but it is not important to customers. These are still opportunities that you could target for cost reduction.?
Create a prioritised list of opportunities: Using the scores assigned to each opportunity, rank them in order of priority. The aim is to uncover areas of your product where you are spending resources on items that either the customers don’t care as much about, or that they are plenty happy with already. And to help in identifying those features and capabilities that promise the greatest return on investment.?
You can also create an Opportunity Landscape (as above) to visually represent the score for each initiative. Plot out each opportunity on a graph with satisfaction on the vertical axis and importance on the horizontal axis.?
Implement in the backlog : Once the opportunities have been prioritised, the next step is to implement the top priority initiatives in your backlogs. Shift development resources away from features that customers don't consider important, but are highly satisfied with, and redeploy them to features that customers find more important, but aren't as satisfied with.
Repeat the process: Opportunity scoring is not a one-time process, but rather an ongoing process that should be repeated every 6 to 12 months to ensure that you are focusing on the initiatives that will have the greatest impact.?
Tips for Successful Opportunity Scoring
Get the internal team to score opportunities : When conducting opportunity scoring, it's important to involve the entire team in the process. This is both for input for potential opportunities and ideas - but much more importantly by getting the internal team to carry out the same scoring for the ideas provided. Once you have the customers’ view and your internal teams’ view, put these side by side to open the teams eye on their perceptions or misconceptions of what really matters to your customers and how their view might differ.?
Divide your customer segments : Collect segmentation information as part of the questionnaire e.g. customer size, role, geography, etc. You can then create multiple score based on the customer segment. This can help you understand the opportunity better based on segments.?
Use a consistent approach: Make sure the is consistent approach when assessing the importance and satisfaction levels of each opportunity. Ideally use the same questionnaire tools, whether it’s with customers, partners or the internal teams.?
Be transparent: Be transparent about the opportunity scoring process and the priorities that have are established as a result of running through these. This can help ensure that the entire team is on board with the decisions that have been made and understands the reasoning behind them.
Conclusion
Opportunity scoring is a great method of prioritisation for product teams looking to address the most relevant customer needs. By assessing the importance and satisfaction levels of each opportunity, and then addressing them in rank order, you can be sure to be building what really matters to your customers.?
For a deeper dive, check out Anthony Ulwick's seminal book on Outcome-Driven Innovation.