If you've read Continuous Discovery Habits by Teresa Torres, you'll understand why many of us feel the pull of graph interfaces when we're doing product discovery work, particularly the Opportunity Solution Tree (OST). It eliminates the need to chase down that OKR deck, comb through your customer insights, and dig around in the solution backlog every time you want to make a decision or communicate what's going on.
There's always a catch
If you've used this brilliant innovation before, you probably experienced two pain points:
- Product discovery tools don't support it natively, which means you have to give up the graph UI or take on yet another data sync problem
- The data synthesis work involved to set one up while you're mid-stream is a serious barrier, and the data drifts over time especially as the team gets busy
Here's what we did about it
Revelica aims to solve both these problems by making the OST a native view unique to each teamspace and their desired outcome. We implemented it so that the graph will stay in sync as you use Revelica to do the real discovery work: synthesizing customer research into opportunities, creating new solution specs, and finding and testing hidden assumptions.
How can my team use it?
We implemented the OST as a navigation tool. Since Revelica is a comprehensive discovery data platform, we have all the details you need, and made it easy to peek into them right from the graph. Some things are full screen, and some can fit in a side panel. Here's an example of what an opportunity looks like in the side panel view.
What about our stakeholders?
The OST is not just a useful tool for keeping your discovery work organized, it is also a brilliant communication tool. Each teamspace has a sharable OST link that is easy to drop into Slack or Teams. We don't use public sharing links on this one to avoid accidentally leaking your strategy when you didn't mean to!
Revelica believes strongly in transparency and including the wider team in the discovery process. That's why we do not use a per-seat pricing model. Even with free viewers, we always found it limited engagement because viewers couldn't really participate in the ways that were impactful. Who doesn't want to have that empowered feeling of sharing their feature request and seeing a full story map with hidden assumptions?
It is our preference to empower people across the company to dream big with solution ideas, to make sure we have a validated customer problem to match, and to learn by understanding the risky assumptions hidden in their ideas. To avoid runaway data clutter, we set it up to be flexible so that you can create isolated teamspaces to manage the sprawl of opportunities and solutions!
What's next?
Our vision is that teams who use the OST framework can use it as their home base for discovery. To realize this, we plan to expand the OST to handle common use cases right from the graph.
Is there something you always wished you could do with OSTs? Share your feedback in the app, we love hearing from others who enjoy using this brilliant tool.
