The 'opportunity score' gives insights for product managers
Kul Sharma is Product Manager Ibbaka. See his skill profile here.
Before joining Ibbaka, I worked as a Technical Product Manager at a large organization in a niche industry. One of the benefits of this situation is that you get initiatives from the sales and marketing team who advocate for new features. These initiatives are largely driven by feedback from lead users or the clients responsible for most of the revenue. You will rarely get the chance to quantify the justification for a new product or service. Often, the loudest voice in the room wins.
When I joined my MBA program, I made sure that I took at least one course focussed on the analytics for a new product or service development. Hence, I took the class ‘New Product Development,’ which focuses on exploring a problem area, developing a list of the features based on user-interviews, and prioritizing these features using the calculated opportunity scores.
In the first month of my job as a Product Manager at Ibbaka, I got a chance to conduct user interviews and launch a survey to affirm the user interviews’ findings. I checked with the stakeholders, and I proposed using the concept of ‘Opportunity Scores’ to guide Ibbaka’s product vision and strategy for 2021. Though it was entirely different from Ibbaka’s usual methodology of conducting interviews and surveys, I got full support and guidance from my team members to figure out the suitable candidates and facilitate the appropriate discussion.
So, what’s an opportunity score?
The mathematical formula for opportunity score is:
Opportunity Score = Importance + Max (Importance - Satisfaction or 0)
(When the current functionality exceeds requirements Max is scored at zero.)
Importance = how important is solving this problem?
Satisfaction = how satisfied are you with your current solution?
We calculate ‘Importance’ and ‘Satisfaction’ on a scale of 1-10, one being the lowest and ten being the highest. The higher the score, the sooner we should deliver a solution. However, a quintessential task for a product manager is to make sure to scrap ideas for functions that don’t get a high enough opportunity score.
When you identify opportunities with a high score you have a responsibility to develop functionality into an intuitive and user-friendly design. Domain-driven design, behavioral-driven design and value-based designs are some of the promising approaches that you can use to have a collaborative and productive design discussion with your team.
You might also want to consider the interaction costs when compared to the alternatives that are already available in the market. Though you have identified a solution with a significant opportunity score and designed the functionality that delivers on the promise, your product will not get initial traction if it cannot reduce interaction costs.
At Ibbaka, I have calculated opportunity scores for various features based on the feedback collected through user-interviews, surveys, and help desk tickets. I have also written a report to consolidate the findings on the opportunity score and how different demographics will play an essential role in implementing the solution.
You can download the report here.
Metrics like ‘Opportunity scores’ keep you honest as a PM, prevent you from including your own biases, and help you in shaping the product roadmap and strategy. I would love to hear more about your experiences with metrics like ‘Opportunity Scores’ and how you leverage them in your work. Contact me at kul@ibbaka.com
