Opportunity Scoring: Finding Your Biggest Product Wins

What is Opportunity Scoring?

Opportunity Scoring is a customer‑driven prioritization technique that helps you identify gaps between importance and satisfaction.

Instead of asking “What features do customers want?”, you ask:

• How important is this outcome or capability?
• How satisfied are you with how the product supports it today?

When you plot importance vs. satisfaction, the biggest importance–satisfaction gaps reveal your strongest opportunities.

Why Opportunity Scoring Matters

It’s especially useful when:

• You want to move beyond feature requests to underlying needs
• You’re working on a mature product with many possible improvements
• You need evidence for where to invest next in the experience

The goal is not to chase every complaint, but to focus on areas that are both important and under‑served.

Step 1: Define Jobs, Outcomes, or Capabilities

Start by listing the things customers are trying to do. For example, for a product analytics tool:

• "Understand which features drive retention"
• "Identify drop‑off points in onboarding"
• "Share insights with stakeholders"

Keep each statement customer‑centric and outcome‑oriented.

Step 2: Design the Survey

For each outcome, ask two questions:

1. Importance:
   "How important is it for you to [outcome]?"
2. Satisfaction:
   "How satisfied are you with how our product supports [outcome] today?"

Use consistent Likert scales, e.g.:

• 1–5 Importance (Not important → Extremely important)
• 1–5 Satisfaction (Very dissatisfied → Very satisfied)

Tips:

• Keep the survey to 10–20 outcomes to avoid fatigue.
• Include an open text box for context and examples.

Step 3: Collect Responses from Target Users

Send the survey to:

• Active users in your target segments
• Decision‑makers and power users, not just casual users
• A mix of new and long‑tenured customers if possible

Aim for at least 30–50 responses per major segment to see patterns.

Step 4: Calculate Opportunity Scores

There are several variants, but a simple approach is:

• Opportunity Score = Importance + (Importance − Satisfaction)

This gives more weight to outcomes that are important but under‑served.

Example:

• Outcome A: Importance 4.6, Satisfaction 2.8
  Opportunity = 4.6 + (4.6 − 2.8) = 6.4
• Outcome B: Importance 3.5, Satisfaction 3.4
  Opportunity = 3.5 + (3.5 − 3.4) = 3.6

Outcome A clearly represents a bigger opportunity.

Step 5: Visualize and Prioritize

Plot each outcome on an Importance vs. Satisfaction chart:

• Top‑left (High Importance, Low Satisfaction) → Big opportunities
• Top‑right (High Importance, High Satisfaction) → Strengths to protect
• Bottom‑left (Low Importance, Low Satisfaction) → Low priority
• Bottom‑right (Low Importance, High Satisfaction) → Possible over‑investment

Focus roadmap discussions on the top‑left quadrant:

• What’s causing low satisfaction today?
• Where can we make targeted improvements?
• Are there quick wins vs. deep redesigns?

Connecting Opportunity Scoring to Features

Opportunity Scoring operates at the outcome level, not the feature level. Once you’ve identified high‑opportunity outcomes:

1. Brainstorm multiple feature ideas that could improve that outcome.
2. Use additional frameworks (RICE, Value vs. Effort, weighted scoring) to prioritize among those ideas.
3. Validate with prototypes or experiments before fully committing.

This keeps you anchored to customer outcomes, not just internal feature ideas.

Best Practices

• Keep questions neutral. Don’t lead customers toward a specific solution.
• Segment your analysis. Different personas may have different opportunity maps.
• Combine quant + qual. Use open‑ended responses to interpret why satisfaction is low.
• Repeat periodically. Re‑run the survey annually or after major releases to track progress.

Common Pitfalls

• Asking about features instead of outcomes (e.g., "dashboards" versus "share insights with stakeholders")
• Over‑focusing on very low satisfaction items that are also low importance
• Treating a single survey as definitive truth rather than an input into discovery

When to Use Opportunity Scoring

Use this method when:

• You have a broad, established product and need to decide where to deepen value
• You want to complement NPS/CSAT with more actionable guidance
• You’re evaluating which areas deserve major UX or workflow investment

For early‑stage products with unclear jobs, start with qualitative research first. Once outcomes are clearer, Opportunity Scoring becomes a powerful way to prioritize improvements against what matters most to customers.

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Want templates for Opportunity Scoring surveys and analysis? Product Leader Academy members get ready‑to‑use survey scripts, spreadsheets, and facilitation guides.