Product discovery glossary

Outcome

Also called: Desired outcome, Product outcome

An outcome is a measurable change in customer or business behaviour that a product team commits to creating. It sits at the root of an Opportunity Solution Tree and answers the question of what should be different in the world. Unlike an output, an outcome describes a result rather than a thing you shipped.

Opportunity

Also called: Customer opportunity, Customer need

In an Opportunity Solution Tree, an opportunity is a customer need, pain point or desire that, if addressed, would move the desired outcome. Opportunities are phrased in the customer's language and describe a problem rather than a fix. They form the middle layer of the tree and are the unit that teams actually prioritise.

Solution

A solution is a specific thing a team could build or change to address one opportunity in an Opportunity Solution Tree. Solutions live below the opportunity they serve, and healthy trees carry several competing solutions per opportunity so the team compares options instead of defending the first idea that appeared.

Experiment

Also called: Assumption test

An experiment is a small, fast test that checks a specific assumption behind a solution before the team commits to building it. In an Opportunity Solution Tree, experiments hang below solutions and produce the evidence that decides whether a solution advances, changes shape, or gets dropped.

Assumption testing

Assumption testing is the practice of identifying the beliefs a solution depends on and checking the riskiest ones with small tests before building. Teresa Torres groups these beliefs into desirability, viability, feasibility, usability and ethical assumptions. It is the mechanism that connects solutions to evidence in an Opportunity Solution Tree.

Evidence

Evidence is the recorded observation that supports or undermines a claim in an Opportunity Solution Tree. It comes from interviews, experiments, analytics and support data, and attaches to the opportunity or solution it speaks to. Trees without evidence become opinion diagrams; evidence is what makes a tree defensible months later.

Continuous discovery

Continuous discovery is the habit of maintaining at least weekly customer touchpoints, run by the team building the product, in pursuit of a desired outcome. The definition comes from Teresa Torres. It replaces occasional research projects with an ongoing rhythm, and the Opportunity Solution Tree is the artefact that keeps that rhythm organised.

Product discovery

Product discovery is the work of deciding what to build and why, as distinct from delivery, which is building it well. It covers understanding customer problems, generating solution options and testing the assumptions behind them. An Opportunity Solution Tree is a way of making the state of that work visible.