In one line: Great products start from a large pool of raw opportunities that are filtered hard. The quality of the few you pursue depends on how many you considered.
Core idea
An opportunity is an idea for a new product: a hypothesis that a need and a solution might come together profitably. It is not yet a project. Ulrich and Eppinger describe opportunity identification as a tournament [1]: generate many opportunities, screen them, develop the promising ones a little further, and select a few exceptional ones to feed the product plan. The more and better opportunities enter the tournament, the better the winners.
How it works
- Establish a charter. Decide where to look: which markets, technologies and customer problems fit the organization’s strategy.
- Generate many opportunities, from internal and external sources:
- customer frustrations and workarounds
- lead users
- new technologies looking for an application
- trends (regulation, demographics, energy)
- competitors’ weaknesses
- existing ideas from employees and labs
- Screen quickly, using simple criteria and multiple reviewers.
- Develop the promising ones with a little research to reduce the biggest uncertainties.
- Select the exceptional ones, the few that are significant, feasible and strategically aligned.
- Reflect on the outcome: did the tournament surface surprising ideas, or only incremental ones?
In practice
A typical funnel narrows sharply: dozens of opportunities explored, a handful developed, one or two given a mission statement and a launch. A classroom example asks teams to imagine a “next generation” lamp for a high-end lighting company facing new efficiency regulations and LED technology. The exercise shows that trends and constraints are themselves rich sources of opportunity. The same discipline helps when choosing a personal project: list several candidates, test each against so what, and who cares?, and pick the one that matters most to its sponsor.
Questions to ask yourself
- Where do new product ideas in my organization actually come from, and who tracks them?
- How many alternatives did we seriously consider before committing to the current project?
- Which trend in my industry is an opportunity we are treating as a threat?
Connections
- Next step: Product Planning. The overall picture: Product Development Funnel.
- Related front-end work: Identifying Customer Needs, Concept Generation.
- Personal application: Engineering Leadership Challenge Project.
- Capabilities exercised: Vision, Initiative, Decision Making.