Reframing solutions into opportunities
Retrieving opportunities involves digging into real customer stories to uncover unmet needs, pain points, or desires. One effective method for this is story-based interviewing. Opportunities uncovered in this way are grounded in reality. They reflect true customer struggles rather than assumptions made by product teams. It's important to avoid creating opportunities off the top of your head, as that can bring biases and irrelevant issues into focus. Instead, using customer stories as a foundation ensures that you're working with genuine, real-world needs.
By mapping out these stories, you can then transform them into actionable opportunities for your team. For example, after hearing multiple customers describe frustration with last-minute flight price hikes, the opportunity becomes clear: create a feature that alerts users when prices are about to increase. This ensures the solutions your team works on are grounded in actual customer pain points.
Pro Tip: Use sales conversations and support tickets as inspiration for future customer interviews, but remember that these sources often lack context.
