Opportunity scoring method

Technique derived from the concept of Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI)

Pavel avatar
Written by Pavel
Updated over a week ago

Product managers need special methods and techniques for determining priorities and getting great business results. There are dozens of popular methodologies from gaming to the most complicated, quantitative and qualitative, for internal and external purposes.

Here’s one of the popular methods - Opportunity scoring 

Opportunity scoring methodology

This method is derived from the concept of Outcome-driven Innovation (ODI) of the American researcher Anthony Ulwik.

The basic prescription of the method is that people buy products and services to get some job done. That is to get the expected result.

One of the main conclusions of the assessment is that customers are not the best source of solutions because they are not experts. However, their contribution is extremely important for understanding the results that they want to obtain from the product.

Custom research and other methods allow you to create a list of desired results for the product. Then you need to ask clients to evaluate each result /update, how important it is for them, and also to find out the degree of satisfaction from 1 to 10.

Ulwik proposes the following formula for using the ODI method:

Importance + max (Importance – Satisfaction, 0) = Opportunity

This determines the most interesting opportunities for innovative areas, including for areas with a high degree of product importance and low level of satisfaction.

These results can be plotted on a chart that visualizes the data for a better understanding of where the opportunities are.

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