What Is Opportunity Mapping
How are you able to evaluate what Epics should be designed and then developed next? How do you ensure you’re not chasing a “shiny” new feature? What about protecting yourself and more importantly the company from becoming the next hot feature factory? The answer is a system or process that helps keep you unbiased and from favoring the next feature that absolutely no User asked for or even needs.
But what System or Process should you implement? We believe that there is no one right answer as this would change depending on the stage of your company, the environment your Product team is in, or if the Founder(s) haven’t trusted their Product team yet.
We have found the best approach is usually a mix of trade secrets from different reputable sources, a hybrid approach. That is how we came to start using “Workflow Opportunity Mapping”. This allows us to turn the decision-making over to the data and remove ourselves from being the sole decision-maker or having stakeholders be influenced by external factors. There is also a large added benefit of having a soundproof response to someone who asks you “Why are you building this next?”.
The Process
This process includes the following 9 steps using an example use case:
What’s The Problem?
We have been noticing that a lot of the traffic who create an account, don’t complete their profile.
Problem Size
In the last 90 Days (June 1st, 2023), 7% of the remaining website traffic attempted to create an account. Yet Signups vs. Completed Profiles did not reach estimates.
Supporting Evidence
Last 90-Day Traffic (After Bounce): 804
Total Signup Attempts: 57
Total Completed Profiles: 8
Affected Users
Abandoned Users
7% of Anonymous Traffic
70% Signup Bounced Traffic
My Hunch
I hypothesized that our current Signup Process is broken due to the fact that 7% of remaining traffic attempts to create an account yet, only 14% successfully create an account. Investigating the Signup Funnel, we see that the majority (65%) drop off on the 3rd/4 page. I suspect that if we can effectively reduce the steps to 3, we will convert at a greater percentage of having a 60% drop-off rate total.
Expected Benefits
Increase signups
Greater return on Ad Spend
Increase demand & supply
Did it Solve The Problem?
90 days after releasing the new Signup Process (V2), we have come to the conclusion that the total drop-off conversion is 68% by removing 1 page of the Signup Process.
New Supporting Data
Signup Conversion (Total on 90 Days) = 68%
Lessons Learned & Gained
During Design Thinking, we learned that new Users will not invest the time this early in engaging with our product to enter information on 4 pages. We found that if we collect the same amount of data in a more elegant way in 3 pages. Also, this makes us suspect that our entrance pages are not conveying enough value propositions to traffic to have them confidently invest the effort & time to create an account.
How Do You Use Opportunity Mapping?
This exercise is to help educate yourself and stakeholders about what you’re looking to build or have prioritized in your Backlog. You can generate a snapshot of your Epic using this Mapping strategy and forward it to colleagues to educate them on your process of thinking. The only thing you need to add is a scorecard to each one mapped. You now have a plan on how to evaluate Epics and follow up to see if it was worth the effort.
The only problem here is that you’re unable to compare one another to see which should go first. We recommend that this practice be implemented once you’ve scored Epics against your Product Vision & Strategy to help give ammo for defending the decision and explaining to stakeholders why you’re building this next and of course, more importantly, how it performed in Production.
Just as we started this post, we believe a hybrid is the best approach when it comes to Product at tech startups. Please, take a look at the board above and see what makes sense to borrow for your team.
