Opportunity Scoring
Opportunity Scoring* is designed to help identify areas for innovation by focusing on the outcomes customers want to achieve with a product or service. By scoring these outcomes based on their importance and the degree to which they are currently satisfied, the Opportunity Score highlights areas where there is the greatest potential for improvement or innovation.
A Scrum Team can create a list of what they believe to be desired customer outcomes for the product. Then, customers are asked to score each outcome on how important it is for them and the degree to which it is satisfied on a scale of 1 to 10. This is then used to create an opportunity score using the following formula: Opportunity Score = Importance + (Importance−Satisfaction)
For example, a team is accountable for building a new product. After some initial user research, the team creates and surveys new and existing customers on three outcomes that they believe will meet their needs:
In the chart, the highest opportunity score is for Save money when using our product with a 14 [9+(9-4)], suggesting this is the most promising area for innovation. Customers rate it as very important but are dissatisfied with current options.
The other outcomes have opportunity scores of 9, showing there is still room for improvement but less urgency compared to Outcome 1, Save money when using our product.
What comes out from this are the most interesting opportunities for innovation, in particular areas with high importance and low satisfaction. It may also be used to identify areas of potential waste, e.g. outcomes customers are highly satisfied with but don’t rank them as important.
To create further shared understanding Scrum Teams can plot the results on a graph and consider how much investment to dedicate to the customer outcomes based on Importance vs Satisfaction as shown in the following graphic.
*originated from Anthony Ulwick’s Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI) framework.
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