Strategy is not a skill one suddenly gains when they become a VP or director. It’s a muscle. PMs need to train as strategists from the beginning so they can make bigger and better decisions as they ladder up. Being a strategist is all about making choices about where you’re going to play versus where you’re not going to play.

Building an OST is a great way for PMs to exercise that decision-making muscle. At the PM level, you might be choosing between sub-opportunities. As a senior PM, you might be looking at the opportunity level; as a group PM, you might be looking between multiple opportunities. By the time you get to the director or VP level, you can confidently make the bigger choices about where you’ll play.

At this time, the company was shifting from output-focused to outcome-focused, and we adopted the lean startup mentality of throwing a bunch of ideas at the wall and seeing what stuck. But this led to a few pitfalls. First, we were taking a “spray and pray” approach to experimentation. We were hustling and experimenting, but the experiments weren’t focused and we weren’t building on our learnings. The second pitfall was incremental thinking vs. step change. We were optimizing on the margins rather than the big rocks that would move the needle. And third, not everybody was clear on the connection between business outcomes and customer problems.

All of these pitfalls in combination were holding us back from where we wanted to go. We needed a way to clearly visualize and articulate how our customer problems aligned to business outcomes so that we could prioritize strategically. An OST did exactly that: as a leader, I could break down problems into clear, manageable pieces and align everyone on the same map. For any team trying to move away from being an output-factory toward an outcome orientation, this tool will be immensely valuable.

When we were building this, an outcome-focused culture was not very prevalent in Southeast Asia at large, so it took a lot of training to help my teams think this way. The OST alone was not enough; it was one of 3 interventions that helped drive the shift. I also introduced NCTs (Narratives, Commitments, and Tasks) from Reforge, as well as product groups.

The first step is to break your problems down into smaller pieces. For instance, here we were trying to drive self-serve, which was largely sales-led, and we had a clear OKR. In order to solve this problem, we broke it down this way: we needed to create awareness about self-serve, close the first purchase, ensure repeat purchases, and increase the average transaction size.

This makes it much simpler and more concrete to start tackling the overall strategic problem. For instance, we could say that our awareness problem was because customers did not visit the platform enough, and there are many solutions we could try to solve that problem. When teams can see the strategy visualized this way, it enables more autonomy because they can be sure they’re focusing on the right things.

I started with a workshop for the team to socialize the idea of an opportunity solution tree. Then to bring this home, we conducted an “outcome marathon,” where product, design, and engineering co-constructed the tree and showcased it to exec. In this case, the product manager was more responsible for business outcomes, a designer and researcher were able to bring the consumer context to the table, and an engineering lead could tell us which solutions were viable and feasible.

Typically in our product org to date, things started with product, then got handed off to design, and then got handed off to engineering. The OST visual and outcome marathon became a great tool for collaboration that we didn’t have previously. 

We adopted the ritual of looking at the OST every 6 weeks as we learned from our experiments, which also altered the tree's shape and the opportunity itself. When we reviewed the tree regularly, quarterly roadmap building became easier. Since we were constantly prioritizing opportunities, it helped the team to do the following:

Focus on high-leverage opportunities instead of feature-level prioritization.

Understand the surface area of choices available (at the opportunity and solution levels) to make better product decisions.

Create a knowledge repository for the future of the opportunities traversed and the learnings therewith.

If you’re looking to learn more about opportunity solution trees, 

 book “Continuous Discovery Habits” is a great place to start. She also writes blog posts and runs courses, which I’ve found incredibly helpful in growing my organization and navigating the shift to being outcome-focused.

Vivek Kumar

This tool was critical to driving a shift from being an output factory to a strategically aligned, outcome-focused business.

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