opportunity-solution-tree

This skill guides product managers through building an Opportunity Solution Tree (OST), a discovery framework from Teresa Torres's Continuous Discovery Habits. It solves the problem of teams jumping straight from a vague stakeholder request to a feature, helping them first extract a measurable target outcome, then diverge into opportunities (customer problems), map candidate solutions, and select a proof-of-concept to test. The explicit goal is to avoid "feature factory" syndrome and premature convergence by ensuring teams solve the right problem before building.

It is an interactive skill that works from a stakeholder request or a target outcome, optionally using any customer evidence, constraints, or already-pushed solutions supplied with the invocation. It structures the tree as one desired outcome, multiple opportunities, and multiple solutions per opportunity, each mapped to experiments, and it evaluates candidate solutions on feasibility, impact, and market fit to recommend a POC with a concrete experiment design. The skill includes a template and worked examples contrasting a good outcome-driven OST with a bad solution-first one (for example, pushing back on "we need to build a mobile app" to reframe it as a measurable engagement outcome). It defers its interaction protocol to a companion workshop-facilitation skill for session flow and one-question-at-a-time facilitation, and clearly states what it is not: not a roadmap generator, not a feature list, and not waterfall planning.

The target users are product managers, product leaders, and discovery-minded teams clarifying vague OKRs, framing new product areas, or prioritizing which problems to solve. It is deliberately not meant for already-validated problems, tactical bug fixes, or situations where stakeholders demand a specific solution.