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Before you run a single customer interview or sketch a single solution, it’s worth spending 30 minutes answering a few simple questions. Not to lock in a direction - but to make sure everyone on the team is looking at the same problem the same way. That’s what an opportunity assessment is for.

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Where it comes from

The opportunity assessment was popularised by Marty Cagan in Inspired as a lightweight alternative to the traditional PRD for early-stage framing. Rather than writing a long requirements document before you’ve done any discovery, you answer four questions that force clarity on the opportunity itself.

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The four questions

1. What problem are we solving? Define the customer problem in one or two sentences. Not the solution, not the feature - the problem. “Users can’t track the status of their orders without calling support” is a problem. “Build an order tracking page” is a solution. 2. For whom are we solving it? Who specifically has this problem? The more specific you can be, the more useful this becomes. “SMB ops managers who process more than 50 orders a week” is more useful than “our customers.” 3. How will we know we’ve solved it? Define success before you start. What metric moves? By how much? If you can’t define what success looks like now, you’ll be inventing it post-launch to fit whatever happened 😅 4. Why now? What’s changed that makes this worth solving today? New customer signal, a competitive threat, a regulatory requirement, a technology shift? If you can’t answer this, it’s worth asking whether the opportunity is actually a priority.

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Why it’s useful

The four questions are simple enough to answer in a short meeting - but hard enough that teams often realise mid-answer that they haven’t actually aligned on the basics yet. That’s the point. Discovering that your PM thinks you’re solving for enterprise customers while your designer thinks you’re solving for SMBs is painful in an opportunity assessment. It’s catastrophic three sprints into development. It also creates a useful artifact. Slip the answers into a doc, share it with stakeholders, and you have a one-page brief that grounds all the discovery work that follows. Reference it when scope creep arrives. And it always arrives 🤷

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Pairing it with the OST

The opportunity assessment frames the what and for whom. The Opportunity-Solution Tree takes it further - mapping the space of opportunities below a desired outcome so you can prioritise which ones to pursue. They work well together: start with an opportunity assessment to get aligned, then build the OST to explore the opportunity space more deeply.