A product team’s job is to create value for the customer in a way that creates value for the business. This is rarely done by fixating on a ranked idea list. It's tool to align on Product Strategy
Opportunities are customer needs, pain points, desires, wants—they are chances for us to intervene in a way that makes our customers’ lives better. You can’t prioritize opportunities if you don’t know what they are.The best way to answer this question is through customer interviews.
For example, if I work at Netflix and my desired outcome is to increase the number of viewing hours per viewer (which should come from an OKR), I might interview Netflix users and ask, “Tell me about the last time you watched Netflix.” In their story, I’m listening for needs, pain points, desires, wants—opportunities that if we addressed them may lead to more viewing hours.
I like to frame opportunities as something a customer might say. This helps to ensure that I’m solving a real customer need and not a business need disguised as a customer need. For example, a customer might say, “I couldn’t find anything to watch,” but they aren’t likely to say, “I wish I binge-watched Netflix more.” The former is an opportunity that if addressed would lead to more viewing hours. The latter is something we wish our customers might say, but isn’t very likely.
Even though we might want our customers to spend more money with us, no customer would say, “I wish I spent more money on groceries.” However, they might say, “I’m looking for new ideas for dinner,” which if we did a good job addressing this need, may very well lead to the customer spending more money. If we focus on collecting stories in our interviews, opportunities will emerge from those stories.
It can be hard to prioritize a flat list of opportunities, because odds are your opportunities are of different shapes and sizes, some are interrelated, others are subsets of others.
For example, if I have the following list of opportunities: