Opportunity Discovery Model (ODM)

I’ve tailored the traditional design thinking process into what I call ODM, which focuses on identifying a collection of opportunities that will aim to improve products and drive customer success.

My Design Process

When starting a project or attacking a problem space, there are many inputs that feed into this work including current roadmap items, big ideas, customer feedback, validations by research, usability audits and overall product expertise. The goal is to holistically evaluate and outline a set of prioritized ideas that aim to solve problems our uses face within their workflow. These ideas will likely need further exploration and discovery, but will serve as workspaces and concepts around identifying potential solutions within the product.

  • What this process is NOT...

    It is not a product backlog in the sense of a stream of work for developers or a roadmap for the Product. (but could end up becoming part of these things if prioritized and validated).

  • What this process IS...

    It is a way to develop a wholistic product vision focusing on the longer term direction that drives customer success and addresses key problems or needed improvements within the product.

It’s about solving problems, not just implementing features.

 

How do I navigate this process?

  • Inputs & Insights provide starting points on what we look into

  • Principles guide and align our efforts

  • Opportunities frame the problem space and identify a workspace

  • Areas of focus are lenses that direct our efforts towards key product areas

  • Concepts identify potential solutions targeting the problem space

  • Assess which ideas need further experimentation

  • Outcomes identify ideas moved direct to the backlog, further discovery needed or to be thrown away

Deep dive of the opportunity lifecycle

Discovery Outputs

  • Opportunity (Cards) workspaces include key big ideas, area of impact, specific user desires and product areas of focus (lenses to navigate identified workspaces)

  • Design and Discovery briefs to frame and present challenges

  • Concepts, experiments and prototypes of key ideas and implementations

  • Opportunity backlog for future discovery

Opportunity Card template artifact

 
 

Where do I go next?

This process is a foundation for how I approach new work and identifying areas of impact I can make as a product designer. This big idea approach then transitions into a more traditional agile iteration and concept implementation approach, partnering with the product team and engineering when it comes to product backlog items.

  • Opportunity Discovery

    As outlined above, this model sets the horizon for areas of product innovation, exploration and improvement.

  • Prioritized Concept Discovery

    I partner with product and engineering to align on our release level plan and begin defining our scope and story map for each area.

  • Delivery & Support

    I partner along side the development team for artifact and asset delivery, accessibility annotation and UI support before launch.

  • Assess and Improve

    As features are released into the wild and we have mass usage of our solutions, we will look to continuous feedback in order to adapt and improve.