1 tip & 3 resources per week to improve your Strategy, OKRs, and Discovery practices in less than 5 minutes. Explore my new book on realprogressbook.com
Four Pragmatic Ways to Improve Opportunity Solution Trees in Practice
Four Pragmatic Ways to Improve Opportunity Solution Trees in PracticeDear Reader, Opportunity Solution Trees (OSTs) are a widely popular visual aid for connecting solution space work to business goals through problem space elements (similar to Impact Mapping).
From seeing the way product teams adopt them in practice, here are four ways I've seen improve their impact for your work: Remember that OSTs are only a Visual SummaryI encourage teams to treat trees as the synthesis at the center (i.e., on Miro) and connect the work at the individual levels to the messy workspaces (interviews, ideation, alignment), etc., so one knows where the Outcome originated. Never treat OSTs as an Artifact of their ownTrees have to connect to execution-guiding artifacts like goals. To make sure that there's some link/documentation to the success metrics of an Output, Experiment, or if the Outcome has been moved. Worth linking to OKR tools or visual aids like Vistaly. The Outcome at the top should link to your company's or team's long-term strategic business goals. Your leading team-level goals should be driven by the solutions you decide to test and build. OSTs need to Facilitate Decision-Making where Value is createdTeams should have the hygiene to choose tools that integrate well with each other or put in the work to do it manually. I believe you can turn Miro artifacts into JIRA issues and link them. Or embed Miro Boards into Notion tasks. It's more about the team's discipline than the tooling. Use Plain Language over JargonAt the core, OSTs are a visual way to connect your business context to the problem and solution space. Instead of torturing teams to arrive at the exact "right" type of artifact per level, work with questions in plain English:
Thank you for Practicing Product, Tim
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As a Product Management Coach, I guide Product Teams to measure the real progress of their evidence-informed decisions.
I focus on better practices to connect the dots of Product Strategy, Product OKRs, and Product Discovery.
Product Practice Newsletter
1 tip & 3 resources per week to improve your Strategy, OKRs, and Discovery practices in less than 5 minutes. Explore my new book on realprogressbook.com
Product Practice #425 What Part of YouIs Making the Decision? PUBLISHED Sep 11, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Dear Reader, For much of my career, I’ve helped product teams work through uncertainty. Chilling with my buddy King Arthur at Tintagel Castle I challenged assumptions, introduced frameworks, and helped people make better decisions when there was no obvious answer. While I still love doing that work, I’ve become increasingly interested in a deeper question over the past six years: From where...
Product Practice #424 Linked Better Practices over Stacked Best Practices PUBLISHED Sep 4, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Dear Reader, “Let’s prioritize by value.” Value for whom? That was the question I explored in last week's essay Business Value, Customer Value, and Team Value Are Different Arguments. Today, let's demystify the term value even further. Nothing is inherently valuable. The same opportunity can have different value under different strategies. For that narrative to check out, we need...
Product Practice #423 Business Value, Customer Value, and Team Value Are Different Arguments PUBLISHED Aug 27, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Dear Reader, As long as everyone focused on Value you can't do the wrong work, right? RIGHT? Well, as lovely as that sounds, I believe there's a tremendous amount of misdirected focus on value going on in teams. Let's dive into it. Three questions hide behind "value" in most conversations: Did this move a number the business gets paid on. Did customers change...