Prioritize Opportunities, Not Solutions

Teresa Torres argues that product teams waste effort ranking backlogs of solutions with made-up scoring formulas. Instead, teams should gather customer opportunities (needs, pain points, desires) from interview stories, organize them into an opportunity solution tree, and prioritize opportunities rather than features. Because the tree structure lets teams assess only one branch at a time, prioritization becomes simpler. She treats these choices as reversible two-way door decisions that should be made quickly and tested through experiments. The piece matters because it reframes product strategy as choosing which customer problems to solve.

01Key takeaways

• Prioritize customer opportunities tied to a desired outcome rather than ranking solution ideas on a backlog.
• Collect opportunities by listening to customers' stories in interviews, framed as statements customers would plausibly make.
• Group opportunities into an opportunity solution tree, keeping branches similar yet distinct, and try multiple groupings.
• Assess only the top row of the tree, then drill into the chosen branch's sub-opportunities to narrow the decision.
• Treat opportunity choices as two-way door decisions: move fast, avoid false precision, and revisit choices through experiments.

02Key sections

Why solution prioritization fails

Ranking feature ideas with scoring spreadsheets misses the point, since output-focused teams prioritize what to build rather than what problems to solve. Shifting to outcome thinking changes the question.

Collecting opportunities from customer stories

Opportunities should be framed as things customers would say and surfaced by starting from a desired outcome and interviewing customers about their last experience.

Mapping the opportunity space

A flat list of opportunities is hard to compare, so they should be grouped into a tree of similar but distinct branches, with groupings tested and refined.

Prioritizing within the tree

Only the top row of the tree needs assessment; after choosing a top opportunity, the team focuses on its sub-opportunities and ignores other branches.

Two-way door decisions and strategy

Opportunity choices are reversible, so teams should decide quickly, avoid over-quantifying subjective judgments, and treat product strategy as the resulting pattern of opportunity choices.

03From the post

“I cringe every time I see product teams use a spreadsheet to rank the ideas in their backlog based on some made-up math formula usually consisting of things like business value, user value, and technical difficulty. While this exercise is pervasive, it misses the point entirely. Our job is”

04Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.