How to tackle the right user problems with OSTs

• Most startups only spend 20% of their time on product discovery.
• Opportunity solution trees (OSTs) help you focus on ideas that drive desired outcomes.
• Stephan Beyer tells us how he uses them as VP of Product at the unicorn, Grover.

Product discovery is essential to the success of your business. Without it, your product teams are stabbing in the dark, shipping new features with no clear outcome in mind.

Believe it or not, experts say that early-stage companies should spend at least 25–50% of their time on product discovery. But in reality, most startups spend just 20% of their time on it, and some spend no time at all.

To dig into the importance of product discovery and how OSTs can help, I caught up with Stephan Beyer — VP of Product at the European tech-rental unicorn, Grover. You can watch our full session here.

But before we get into some practical tips, let’s get aligned on exactly what we mean by OSTs.

What are opportunity solution trees (OSTs) and how do they benefit product managers?

An opportunity solution tree (OST) is a visual representation of the problem you’re trying to solve and, importantly, the impact you’re trying to drive.

You can draw it out as a mindmap or run a remote-friendly post-it exercise in Miro or FigJam. However you do it, your OST should include these five branches:

1. Desired outcome — the impact you want to drive and the north star of your OST
2. Opportunities — the needs, ideas, and pain points that could drive your desired outcome
3. Solutions — concrete solutions for how an opportunity could be realized
4. Experiments — details of how a solution can be validated with the least possible effort
5. Results — data to illustrate whether the solution drove the desired outcome

Like I said earlier, most product managers skip to the solutions step, often driven by a dangerous misinterpretation of company values like “bias for action” and “fail fast”. But if you don’t take the time to define your desired outcome, you’re like a headless chicken — trying to get a lot done with no clear order or direction. (Cue the Benny Hill theme.)

Now we’ve got the theory out of the way, let’s dive into some practical tips to help you:

• Define a desired outcome and make it your north star
• Improve alignment with your stakeholders
• Keep engineers motivated

Let’s go!

Define a desired outcome by asking: what does the girl need?

This image is the perfect analogy for understanding OSTs and the difference between solutions and desired outcomes. So let me ask you again, what does the girl need?

You might say:

• A ladder
• A snack
• A lower shelf

These are all solutions. Valid solutions, no doubt. But we don’t know for sure which of these solutions will give her what she really needs. They narrow our thinking, rather than expanding it.

So let me ask you again. But this time, you have to use verbs instead of nouns. What does the girl need?

The answer: she needs to be able to reach.

This reframes the problem around a desired outcome, widening the space to explore new opportunities and solutions. And, importantly, they give us something concrete to verify our ideas and experiments against.

Improve stakeholder alignment by sharing a visual framework

A product roadmap is a brilliant way of prioritizing and managing feature releases. But when it comes to communicating that plan to stakeholders across the business and reprioritizing on the fly, well, let me just say good luck!

This is one area that OSTs can really help. By visualizing what you’re working on as a tree, everyone can clearly see how the experiments you’re running ladder up to your desired outcome.

But that’s not all. If you zoom out a little further, you can even show how your desired outcomes stem from your product strategy, product vision, and even your company mission and objectives.

In practice, this means you can finally stop responding to ideas with: “Sorry, it’s not on the roadmap.” Instead, you can add them to your OST, weigh them up alongside your other opportunities, and reprioritize to focus on the lowest-effort experiments.

Keep engineers motivated by taking them along for the ride

Imagine telling a writer to go and write an article without knowing the goal of the content, where it would be seen, and how it would fit into your wider content strategy?

That fact is that there’s nothing more demotivating for engineers than just to be told to go and build something. You can’t assign tickets with zero context and expect your developers to give 110%.

What impact is this feature going to have on users? What problems will it solve for them? And what will it do for the business? These are all questions that OSTs can answer.

By bringing your engineers into the ideation process, you can give them the context they need to make better micro-decisions in their day-to-day work.

Final thoughts

Opportunity solution trees (OSTs) are a valuable way for product managers to focus experiments on desired outcomes. This widens the space to explore new opportunities and solutions, improves stakeholder alignment, and keeps engineers motivated.