Opportunity Scoring

What is opportunity scoring? 

Opportunity scoring is a prioritization model that helps PMs identify which product ideas they should focus development on. It’s a model that dives deeper into customer feedback to find out what features users believe are important, and what features they feel underserved by. It then collates these criteria to generate an easy-to-understand score. 

As a Product Manager, you’re constantly making choices. Shall you work on this idea over here, or that feature idea over there? By using opportunity scoring, you give yourself more data from which to make informed decisions and ensure you’re working on what offers the most value to your customers. 

Your product has multiple different features that your customers can use right? Depending on their preferences, industry, or customer segment, they’re going to find some features wayyy more important than others. The process of opportunity scoring will help you discover the preferences and priorities your customers have.

Through gathering customer feedback for opportunity scoring, you’ll start to learn the features your customers can’t live without. Granted this is something that your adoption rate can help you find, too, but this prioritization model goes further. In addition, you’ll also learn how satisfied your customers are with your features. This allows you to see if there’s anything that your customers don’t like, or think isn’t good enough. 

Opportunity scoring combines both these metrics – adoption/usage and satisfaction –  meaning that you’ll be able to easily see if you have features that are important but not very good in the eyes of your customers. This can steer you towards what you should work on next, as features with a high opportunity score represent a big, well, opportunity if you fix them and make them better.

Think about it like this. If you’re going to use time and resources to further develop a feature, it’s best that it’s a feature that users care about. It’s a waste of time working on a feature users have little interest in, or on a feature that they think is already doing the job well. Opportunity scoring helps you dig out these high-opportunity gems.

Who invented opportunity scoring?

Opportunity scoring is the brainchild of Tony Ulwick, invented in the 1990s alongside the other core components of the outcome-driven innovation framework (ODI). Ulwick believed that traditional methods of prioritization were missing the mark on understanding what customers wanted, so invented this model to cut through the noise and hone in on what really mattered. 

That’s the reason why this approach is so customer-centric, using feedback to learn what they’re trying to achieve instead of what they thought they needed to achieve it. Customers can struggle to articulate feature needs, but outcomes are a lot easier for them to envision and share. 

Opportunity scoring eliminates the guesswork of feature prioritization. By focusing on the outcomes that matter most to customers, opportunity scoring helps product teams zero in on the features that will have the greatest impact. It’s like having a cheat code for delivering exactly what your users want – often before they even know they want it. 

Originally designed for businesses to identify product and service opportunities, this model has been successfully adopted by Product Managers to determine what product idea is right to prioritize on their product roadmap. 

What are the benefits of opportunity scoring?

Opportunity scoring is a worthwhile prioritization model to add to your toolkit. If you’re struggling to determine the best next steps for your product, it guides you towards the right ideas. 

Some of the key benefits of opportunity scoring include: 

Simplicity and accessibility

Even if math isn’t your strong suit, working out an opportunity score is pretty simple to understand and implement. Providing that you can add and subtract, it’s an accessible tool that doesn’t require too much brainpower for Product Managers to generate. 

This means that you can access data easily to influence key decision-making.

Data-driven prioritization

With opportunity scoring, you’re not going off assumptions, instead, you’re using genuine data and insight to inform your prioritization. Opportunity scoring involves getting opinions directly from your customers, so it allows you to tap into their thoughts, eliminating any guesswork. 

With opportunity scoring, you’re getting quantitative data, helping you to effectively visualize something that is typically subjective and turn it into an objective resource.  

Customer-centric focus

This method zeroes in on what matters most to your customers by assessing their satisfaction with current solutions. A by-product of this is that it can help you improve your overall customer experience. By knowing key areas that need improvement and by using opportunity scoring to address them, you’re building a better product for your customers, helping them to see the value in your product. 

Over time, this can reduce your Time to Value and improve your customer acquisition. Greater satisfaction will also lead to less customer churn. 

Better team alignment

Like many other prioritization models, opportunity scoring helps you organize your team, ensuring that everyone is on the same page about what features you’re working on and why. This data helps boost collaboration and transparency within your product team structure, reducing internal conflicts and issues. 

As a Product Manager, when you make team decisions, you want to equip yourself with evidence to prove why you’re doing something over the other. Opportunity scoring gives you that evidence so that you and your team can confidently work towards the same goals.

Are there any drawbacks to Opportunity Scoring?

There are a few things you need to consider before embracing opportunity scoring with open arms. Yes, it can help you prioritize features, but there are a few issues with it that if ignored can mess you up. 

Here are a few of the main drawbacks that you need to have in mind to stop you from making any mistakes with this method.

Reliance on accurate data

Opportunity scoring is only as good as the data you put into it. For it to work effectively, you need to make sure that the quality of your customer feedback is at a good standard. If there’s bias, or if the results are incomplete or improperly gathered, you can end up with scores that are misguided and that may not truly reflect the wants and needs of your customers.

To help ensure that you get hold of accurate data, you should train your customer teams to get really useful feedback. We’ve got a really helpful slide deck to help you do that. You can download it below 🔽. 

Overemphasis on existing needs

One thing to be aware of is that opportunity scoring only focuses on improving existing features. Focusing on what you already have can limit innovation and box you into making incremental improvements instead of breakthrough changes that could set your product apart in the market. 

Resource-intensive process

Collecting and analyzing the necessary data for opportunity scoring can be time-consuming and complex, especially for larger organizations or products with numerous features. This process requires significant effort to execute effectively and needs to be coordinated well. 

If you haven’t got the time or resources to focus on opportunity scoring, you may want to use other prioritization methods that look at data and customer trends that you already have. There’s a ton of frameworks you can use. Check out our complete eBook that highlights 17 of the best prioritization frameworks. 

How do you work out your opportunity score? 

Finding the opportunity score of your features is simple once you have gathered the right information. All you need to do is plug some statistics into a formula. However, it can take a bit of effort to get those statistics. 

See, before you can do anything, you need to get an average importance and satisfaction score from your customers. Your best bet to do this is through a customer survey, questionnaire, or even interviews. To get a more accurate reading, you also want to make sure that you get replies from customers that best reflect your entire user base. This is why you may want to utilize your Customer Advisory Board to get answers from customers you trust who also reflect a nice share of your audience. 

To get your importance and satisfaction scores, you need to ask your customers to provide a rating out of 10. Now remember, opportunity scoring is all about customer outcomes, so you’re going to want to focus on outcomes that reflect the needs, pain points, and desires of your target customers. 

Once you’ve gotten your feedback in, you’ll then be able to work out the average importance and satisfaction score for each outcome you’ve asked about. From here, you can pop the numbers into the formula below to get your results:

Opportunity Score = Importance + max⁡(Importance−Satisfaction,0)

Hold on. What’s with the zero? Who’s Max? Confused? Let’s break it down. 

When working out an opportunity score, you only want to concern yourself with the results where satisfaction is lower than the importance. That makes sense, because if there is a high satisfaction, well then it means that it’s not really an opportunity. 

All that max and 0 do in the formula is make sure that you can’t run the formula if importance minus satisfaction equals a value below 0, which would happen if satisfaction is higher than importance. So, with that caveat out the way, we can just go and remove these extra details to create a much nicer, less intimidating formula of: 

Awesome. Let’s plug some numbers in as an example to see the formula in action. Let’s say a specific outcome got an average importance score of 7 and a satisfaction score of 4. Popping those in gives you:

Opportunity score = 7 + (7-4)

If you remember your order of sums from school, you’ll know that you need to work out the equation in the brackets first, giving you:

7 + 3

That equals 10. This is your opportunity score for that specific outcome. From there you can then go through all the different outcomes you asked your customers about and then compare your results to find where the best opportunity lies. Once you know which one has the highest score, you can then focus on creating features that help users achieve those outcomes.

What are the best practices for using opportunity scoring?

If you’re excited by the prospect of using opportunity scoring, you need to make sure that you do things right. To help you gather the best insights from your customers so that you can build accurate scores, follow these opportunity-scoring best practices and tips. 

• Nail down customer wins: Get specific by writing crystal-clear outcome statements for your customers to score. They should be measurable and laser-focused on what they care about. 
• Use your customer’s voice: When writing outcomes, make sure to do so from the customer’s point of view. Avoid technical jargon or insider terms to ensure that they fully understand what you’re asking about.
• Get an appropriate sample size: A survey with 100s of responses is more reliable than one with 10. Collect feedback from a broad and varied sample of your target audience. The more diverse, the better as you’ll reflect various segments of your audience. 
• Stay consistent: Use a standard set of questions to evaluate how important each outcome is and how happy customers are with current solutions. Consistency makes comparing results as smooth as butter.
• Avoid bias: You don’t want to put ideas into your customer’s heads. Design your surveys to steer clear of bias. Avoid leading questions, and give your customers the freedom to share their unfiltered thoughts.
• Maintain strategic alignment: Once you have your opportunity scores, be sure that high-priority features match your North Star value and objectives and key results. You don’t want to be pulled away from your overall mission. 
• Test and refine: When building updates and improvements based on your opportunity score findings, whip up prototypes or minimum viable products (MVPs) and test them with real customers. Make sure your solutions hit the mark.
• Don’t just do it once: Continue to use opportunity scoring to help you see how opinions change and assess the success of your fine-tuning. By using a customer feedback loop, you’ll continue to learn and further drive improvements
• Track results: Measure how your new features or improvements are impacting customer satisfaction and business metrics. You can make use of pirate metrics to assess the customer journey or product launch metrics to see how your improved features are shaping up
• Record everything: Keep a detailed log of your methods, data sources, scoring criteria, and decisions. This will be your roadmap for consistency and future reference.

Spot the gap 

Opportunity scoring enables you to clearly see which features need work, based on your customer’s opinions and desires. It’s like a sonar that when used with other tools can point you towards high-value changes and iterations. With a few customer surveys, a sprinkle of math, and a dash of common sense, you can easily prioritize features that offer the biggest bang for your buck – and keep your team laser-focused on what really matters.

Just remember, opportunity scoring is only as good as the data you feed into the model. It’s crucial to gather accurate, unbiased customer feedback, or you might end up chasing after the wrong opportunities. And while it’s fantastic for honing in on what’s already on the table, don’t let it box you into just incremental improvements. Leave some room for those breakthrough innovations that could set your product apart.

Opportunity scoring is not the only tool in your arsenal. It’s just one option within your massive toolkit of prioritization techniques. When looking to help prioritize your items or tasks, you should make use of other models and frameworks like Kano, RICE scoring, or MoSCoW prioritization to ensure you’ve got a wide range of data to make good decisions. 

If you’re keen to use customer feedback to help pinpoint where your product can improve, you can use ProdPad in multiple ways to identify key areas. Our priority chart enables you to find high-impact wins for little effort. You can also tie feedback to Ideas to make sure you solve the right problems for your customers. 

Keen to see what else ProdPad can offer you? Try today for free and explore our features that help make good Product Managers great.