Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. There are all kinds of ways to introduce continuous discovery habits. If you’ve been at your company for a while, you might get inspired after reading a book or attending a conference. If you’re joining a new company, you might want to try a new tactic out with your new team. And if you’re really excited about an idea, you might look for opportunities to share it outside your company with the broader product community.
Today’s Product in Practice features a continuous discovery champion who did all three.
Tali Melchior, Director of Product Management at Texthelp, was first inspired to experiment with opportunity solution trees in a previous role. Then when Tali moved to her current position, she brought her opportunity solution tree knowledge along and adapted it to the new setting. And finally, Tali was so convinced of the power of opportunity solution trees that she started leading workshops at product events to teach others how to use this tool.
We were so inspired by Tali’s enthusiasm that we just had to share her story here on the Product Talk blog.
Do you have your own Product in Practice you’d like to share? You can submit your story here.
Meet the Continuous Discovery Champion, Tali Melchior
Tali Melchior is the Director of Product Management at Texthelp, an inclusive technology company that specializes in tools that help people in education or in the workplace read, write, and research with confidence. Texthelp has over 50 million users served by 12 product teams in the US, the UK, and in the Nordics.
Tali directs Texthelp’s product management team in the Nordic region, which creates products tailor-made for the educational market in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Describing her team’s work, Tali says, “Our goal is to deliver robust and user-friendly products and our purpose is to advance literacy and help people understand and be understood.”
Tali first became aware of opportunity solution trees and continuous discovery in a book club at her previous company. When they read Continuous Discovery Habits, Tali says she found the methods both inspiring and practical and she started by mapping opportunity solution trees: “It raised so many questions about the business goals and the product goals. These were questions we were already asking, but by mapping them into the trees, it created clarity, helping us see where things were not defined well enough by us or by management.”
Mapping questions about business and product goals into opportunity solution trees created clarity, helping us see where things were not defined well enough by us or by management. – Tweet This
After trying it out herself, Tali conducted a series of workshops with her dev team, explaining the basic concepts and then filling out the tree together. “It was a great experience,” says Tali. “The developers found it engaging and we had good discussions in which we could focus on opportunities rather than solutions. ‘Outcome over output’ became a motto we repeated often.”
Another benefit Tali observed was that this increased transparency led to greater trust in the development team among business stakeholders. “They were impressed to hear that our conversations around prioritization were not only pragmatic and technical, but took into consideration strategic questions and were linked to higher level business goals.”
Stakeholders were impressed that our conversations around prioritization were pragmatic, technical, and took into consideration strategic questions and were linked to higher level business goals. – Tweet This
Bringing Opportunity Solution Trees to a New Role and Company
Tali’s team (from left to right): Bente Henrikka Moxness, Eva-Maria Dietmann, Tali Melchior, Kasper Lund Wessmann, Ulrica Leander, and Sisse Boll all enjoyed reading Continuous Discovery Habits.
With those initial wins under her belt at her previous company, Tali says she was eager to share these learnings with her new team when she joined Texthelp in January 2023. One of her first steps? Buying everyone a copy of Continuous Discovery Habits. Next, the team began conducting interviews and creating interview snapshots.
After building those habits, Tali knew it was time to start creating opportunity solution trees for each product. “It wasn’t easy to get started,” says Tali, “but our trees are slowly expanding into a small forest, and the biggest benefit I see so far is that they are helping us focus on one outcome at a time. I myself am a visual thinker, and a big believer in external representations as a tool to create common ground (as Barbara Tversky is quoted in Teresa’s book).”
The biggest benefit I see of opportunity solution trees so far is that they are helping us focus on one outcome at a time. – Tweet This
Tali’s team now uses FigJam to build opportunity solution trees like the ones shown here. Click the image to see a larger version.
Tali’s team now has a FigJam document that contains five trees. While they don’t maintain all the trees regularly, they revisit them whenever they reach a crossroads where they need to increase focus or make big decisions. For example, they recently had stakeholders in three different geographic regions asking for improvements specific to their markets. Tali explains, “When planning the roadmap for the coming two quarters, we mapped the improvements to the opportunity tree and showed the stakeholders how we linked each improvement they had requested to various business goals. One was focused on retention of existing customers. Another was focused on adopting new ones. By sharing the tree with them, we could move the discussion forward. The tree was a good foundation for dialogue which eventually led to all stakeholders agreeing to start with a certain set of features that would move us toward the one goal. We agreed that when that set of features was done, we could shift our focus to the other goal.”
Tali has become such a champion of opportunity solution trees that she recently facilitated a three-hour workshop at UXDX in Dublin, “Opportunity Solution Trees: Finding Your Way in the Forest.”
Tali was so excited to share her experience with opportunity solution trees, she led a workshop at UXDX in Dublin.
To prepare for the workshop, Tali created a fictional case study, and with the help of ChatGPT, she generated six interview snapshots and some analytics dashboards. Based on the information she provided, she tasked the participants with creating opportunity solution trees, drawing experience maps, enriching their trees with opportunities and solutions, and mapping assumptions to test. Then, based on a defined product goal, they were asked to prioritize a specific opportunity and explain their choice.
The audience at Tali’s UXDX workshop was excited to get the chance to practice building opportunity solution trees.
Describing the experience, Tali says, “The workshop was a huge success and people were really excited to have such hands-on experience with Teresa’s methods. I am so glad I could pass on my enthusiasm and share the benefits of using OSTs and hope to keep spreading the word in future!”
I am so glad I could pass on my enthusiasm and share the benefits of using OSTs and hope to keep spreading the word in future! – Tweet This
Participants from Tali’s opportunity solution tree workshop shared their main takeaways. Click the image to see a larger version.
Overcoming Challenges: Different Ways of Building the Trees and Communicating with Stakeholders
While her team has made a lot of progress, Tali admits that this process hasn’t always been easy. One of the biggest challenges? Just diving in and knowing where to start. “There isn’t always one way of mapping a tree,” says Tali.
Sometimes her team draws the tree from the bottom up, mapping solutions and then defining the opportunities they will address and the product goal the opportunity will serve. For example, in a field test with users, they saw that there was some confusion with icons in their product. Two were quite similar and users weren’t sure which one to click on. In that case, they mapped “redesigning the icons” as a solution, and then linked it to the opportunity “I want the product to be intuitive and easy to use,” which linked well to the product objective of “increasing the happiness of our users” for that product.
“By defining clearly which opportunity we were occupied with, we could link other UX/UI improvements we had in our backlog to the same opportunity, and add new ones under that opportunity branch,” says Tali. “That exercise helped us sharpen our prioritization and give more nuance to the general idea that we should ‘improve the user experience.’”
In another case, they drew the tree from top to bottom, and then realized that it made more sense to start with an experience map and attach opportunities to phases in the user journey.
And in yet another case, they were launching a new product and it actually felt like it was too early to build the tree. “The scope was predefined and there wasn’t really room for addressing opportunities that were out of scope,” says Tali. But she wasn’t discouraged by this experience. “It’s an ongoing learning process, but the journey is interesting and we are learning so much along the way.”
One of the other challenges Tali has observed is deciding how much of the tree to share with stakeholders who may not understand the structure, but she’s found a method that seems to work well: “Our way of presenting the tree was creating a list of business goals with nested bullet points showing the opportunities, and below each opportunity a set of solutions. We found that visualizing the tree that way helped us communicate the part of the tree we were working with.”
Key Learnings and Takeaways
One of Tali’s biggest learnings sounds simple, though it may be hard to actually pull off: “Take small steps and don’t fret.” Tali continues, “It can be time consuming to do continuous interviewing and to create and update the trees. It is about creating habits and it takes some time and effort. Sometimes even doing just a subset of the work can be valuable.”
It can be time consuming to do continuous interviewing and to create and update the trees. It is about creating habits and it takes some time and effort. – Tweet This
Tali shares another major observation about team structure and resources: “We don’t all have the privilege of working in companies that have a product trio in place.” Texthelp has very few designers who are shared across teams, and they have also been short on software engineering leads. That puts a big weight on the shoulders of the product manager. “While it would be ideal to work in a trio, in reality it means the product manager can be either lonely in the product discovery task, or just busy with product delivery tasks and low on capacity for doing great discovery,” says Tali.
But Tali has found one approach she’d recommend to others: “One of the things I do to help with this is arranging quarterly team days for the product managers.” In their most recent team day in Trondheim, they had a book club session in which they discussed a few chapters from the book and had an opportunity solution tree workshop where product managers worked on their trees in pairs. Tali says, “Carving out the time for it was helpful, as well as having a product manager community in which we share tips and best practices for making time for discovery.”
Are you looking for some extra support as you begin using opportunity solution trees with your team? Come join us in the next cohort of Opportunity Mapping, where you’ll get plenty of hands-on practice in a supportive setting!
