Opportunities overview
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In this article:
What is an Opportunity?
Once you’ve done ample research and documented your customer insights, you can analyze those insights to identify Opportunities. An Opportunity is a ‘problem area’ that you have pinpointed within your customer journeys where you can make a positive change for your customer. You can uncover these problem areas or Opportunities by grouping Insights together.
All Opportunities are stored in one place, so that anyone in your organization—across teams, business units, and geographies—can identify their own core problems based on yours (and vice versa) and reuse them in other journeys.
How to create an Opportunity in TheyDo
You can create Opportunities in TheyDo in two ways:
1. Add Opportunities directly to Journeys: In a journey, click in the Opportunity lane under any step to add an Opportunity to that step. Once added, it will appear as a card in your journey lane.
2. Add Opportunities within the Opportunity Library: Within the Opportunity Library, click on ‘create new’ to create a new Opportunity. You can then add it to any Opportunity lane in any journey.
As you begin creating a new Opportunity, you’ll see any similar Opportunities pop up to help avoid duplicates. Aim for 5 to 8 Opportunities per Journey in order to keep the number of Opportunities manageable.
The Opportunity card
When creating a new Opportunity or editing an existing one, an Opportunity card will open up in the side panel where you can view or edit the properties.
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Here’s a breakdown of each property available within the Opportunity card. Click ‘add property’ to add those that are not immediately visible:
Title: make the title descriptive so your colleagues can understand what it is and easily find it
Type: choose one of the Opportunity types in TheyDo or specify your own by editing them in your Workspace’s Taxonomy
Owner: identify who owns the Opportunity
Status: choose one of the statuses in TheyDo or specify your own by editing them in your Workspace’s Taxonomy
Group: choose the team for which the Opportunity is relevant. These can also be edited in your Workspace’s Taxonomy.
Tags: choose the tags for which the Opportunity is relevant. These can also be edited in your Workspace’s Taxonomy.
Effort: indicate how much effort the Opportunity will take on a scale of 0 to 5 (0 being very low effort and 5 being very high effort).
Value score: estimate how much positive impact the Opportunity will have on the customer experience and how valuable it is for the business. The value score is the average of its customer and business value.
Detail tabs: switch between the tabs below to see how Opportunities are linked to other Building blocks, including other Opportunities, Solutions, Journeys, Insights, and Goals.
Description: frame your opportunity in an inspiring way so that it is more effective.
Linking an Opportunity to one or more steps in your journeys helps you find where problems come from. This way, everyone in the organization understands how the Opportunity affects things.
How to write an Opportunity
The way you frame your Opportunities impacts how effective they are. Here are some tips for ensuring that your Opportunities present challenges in a way that invites creative solutions.
Pose it as a “How might we?” question: use this design thinking method to reframe a problem or challenge into an Opportunity.
- HMW help [target group] to [goal] when [context]
- HMW [how to improve] the [service/product/pain point] for [target group]
Focus on root problems: make sure Opportunities focus on root customer problems, rather than desired outcomes or symptoms of those problems, by asking ‘why’ something happens.
Avoid suggesting Solutions in your Opportunities: phrase Opportunities in a way that doesn’t imply any particular Solution, so that you don’t limit the creativity of your Solutions.
Find the balance between broad and specific: make your Opportunities broad enough to inspire multiple solutions, but specific enough to not lose sight of the root problem you’re trying to solve. If an Opportunity feels too broad, try to split it up into several smaller Opportunities.
Phrase your Opportunities positively: use positive language to shift the focus of your Opportunities to growth and improvement instead of fixating on problems. This will spark brainstorming and open up a wider range of potential Solutions.
Ensure that Opportunities are ‘MECE’: Mutually Exclusive, yet Collectively Exhaustive
- Mutually Exclusive means that every Opportunity is distinctly separate and does not overlap with other Opportunities
- Collectively Exhaustive means that together they cover all important root problems.