How To Tame Your Unruly Opportunity Solution Trees

Every article you read about Opportunity Solution Trees (OST) shows the same thing: a beautifully organised diagram with clear hierarchies, thoughtfully organised opportunities, and neatly arranged solutions. But if you've used OSTs in practice, you know the reality: they get messy. Fast.

Luckily there are four strategies for keeping OST's clean:

1. Apply Parent-Child Relationships - group similar opportunities under parents to create a more branching structure that is easier to read

2. Merge Duplicates (carefully). We have a tendency to merge similar-ish items but that means we can lose nuance.

3. Split trees by Objective. You should create a separate OST for each product objective. You might duplicate opportunities across trees but each tree becomes more legible.

4. Split trees by personas / job-to-be-done. A business traveller and a budget conscious student likely have very different needs and therefore different solution opportunities.

Using these methods you can keep trees easy to read and actionable. But splitting creates a new problem: lots of trees. I go into how you solve this problem in more detail in my article below.

This Week’s Updates

Enabling the Team

The Betterment Metric by Angie Jones
Angie introduces the Betterment metric, which encourages proactive improvement within teams. It’s a great way to categorize behaviors from completion to continuous enhancement of systems.

When Your Team Bypasses You To Get Things Done by Jenny Fernandez
When teams bypass their leaders to get things done, it can signal gaps in trust or communication. Leaders should address this by fostering openness and clear expectations.

Product Direction

Jobs To Be Done: Comparing Different Frameworks by Go Practice
A comparison of popular Jobs to Be Done frameworks to help teams choose an approach that aligns with product goals and improves user-centered strategy.

The Problem With Growth: Why Everything Is Failing Now by Joanna Weber
The industry's obsession with rapid growth and speed often leads to systemic failures, stressing the need for a balanced approach that considers quality and user needs.

Continuous Research

How to Tame your Unruly Opportunity Solution Trees by Rory Madden
Every article you read about Opportunity Solution Trees (OST) shows the same thing: a beautifully organised diagram with clear hierarchies, thoughtfully organised opportunities, and neatly arranged solutions. But if you've used OSTs in practice, you know the reality: they get messy. Fast.

How The Right UX Metrics Show Game-Changing Value by Jared M. Spool
The article illustrates how a UX team improved an invoice-tracking application, leading to over $100 million in annual revenue, by selecting and leveraging the right UX metrics.

Continuous Design

UX Design Isn’t Dead, You’re Just Confused by Meghan Logan
UX design is evolving. It’s not dead but adapting to focus more on understanding users and creating experiences that help them achieve their goals effectively.

UX Roadmap: Your Design Blueprint To Align Stakeholders by Giada Gastaldello
The UX roadmap is shaping strategic direction, prioritizing initiatives, and aligning stakeholders. Defining the UX vision and strategic goals, can offer guidance on creating a successful UX roadmap design. [Sponsored Content]

Continuous Development

Things We Learned About LLMs In 2024 by Simon Willison
2024 brought major LLM developments, including better efficiency, the rise of local models, and improved multimodal support. Creating more accessible & advanced AI tools for developers.

Product Management Is Broken. Engineers Can Fix It by James Hawkins
By empowering engineers to make product decisions PostHog redefined the PM-engineer relationship, with PMs providing necessary context and support.

Announcing Pamela Mead & Jeff Chow:
Two Game-Changing Speakers Join UXDX EMEA 2025!

We’re excited to announce that Jeff Chow, Chief Product & Technology Officer at Miro, and Pamela Mead, Global VP of Design at SumUp, are joining the speaker lineup for UXDX EMEA 2025!

With over 25 years of experience, Jeff has led teams at Miro, InVision, Google, and TripAdvisor, focusing on customer-centric digital products and fostering collaborative team cultures. Pamela, with 15 years in design leadership, has shaped design practices at SumUp, Delivery Hero, and Yahoo!, and is passionate about creating meaningful products that impact people’s lives.

Both speakers bring a wealth of knowledge in transforming organizations, building design teams, and leading innovation in high-growth environments. Their sessions are set to inspire and empower you to tackle the future of product and design.

Don’t miss out to upskill your team at UXDX 2025!

THE UXDX MAJOR EVENTS

FREE COMMUNITY EVENTS 

Check out more upcoming community events 

Video of the Week
Building Design Systems That Work for Design and Dev

Parisa Bazl, Head of UX at Commvault, takes you on a transformative journey of creating scalable design systems in large organizations. In this session, she shares practical insights on achieving natural consistency, balancing modularity, and organizing workflows into reusable patterns.

Discover how collaboration and thoughtful design can elevate your systems and streamline development. Dive into Parisa’s full talk here 👇

The Results of Last Week’s Poll

The question: Which documentation methods do you currently use to capture and share research insights?

On a lot of the polls the answers are all so even that it makes it hard to add meaningful insights. This is not one of those polls. Reports is by far the most common way to share insights.

I get it, it’s the default, everyone is expecting a report, so sharing insights in a report is not going to rock the boat. There used to be a saying “Nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM”. I think that is the same with reports. I don’t think they are the most actionable way of sharing insights but they are the standard.

Maybe I’m wrong and they are working for you, but I’d like you to think the core goal of sharing insights - turning insights into action. Think of your reports as you would your product. Who is the customer? How does this help them to achieve their job-to-be-done? When do they receive the report and when do they need the value of the insights? Is there a gap here? What do they need to do to turn the insights into actions? Could this be improved?

It’s clear that while reports dominate, there’s a mix of methods being applied, especially when it comes to more visual or collaborative approaches. If you want to refine how you document your research insights and explore new approaches, check out our course on Continuous Research.