Today I’m writing about a framework that we have been using recently at work to identify potential opportunity areas to invest in over the coming months. Created by the Growth team at Spotify, the Thoughtful Execution Framework is designed to help cross-functional teams structure their thinking while coming up with product ideas.
The framework is presented as a tree structure that leads through a sequence of steps that helps cross-functional teams to go wide (insights, data, problems) before zooming into individual solutions.
Please find the main steps outlined below:
1. Define your goal
Set a desired (and measurable) outcome for the project. This goal should be based on the company strategy, existing data and customer insights. Some examples: “Uplift in retention in a specific country” or “Increase consumption of recommended content”.
2. Gather all relevant data & insights
This step helps us base our next opportunity areas on existing research, user behaviour with your product or any other type of quant data. The insights gathered from the data analysis will help us frame the opportunity areas we might want to invest on.
3. Identify user problems / opportunity areas
When working on something new or driving the strategic direction of the product you might not merely identify user problems to address, but untapped opportunities that if addressed well, could provide user and business value.
4. Generate hypotheses
Any untapped opportunity can be solved in multiple ways. That’s why you need to generate multiple hypotheses for each opportunity and assess which would return the most impact.
5. Come up with solutions
After you’ve selected the hypotheses that you want to create solutions for, it's time to start coming up with as many ideas as possible. You can then analyse the ideas in terms of feasibility and and anticipated impact. "What would be the easiest to build?” versus "which ideas would bring the biggest learnings".
6. Learnings
As with most modern product development frameworks, we need to test the result of our work once it’s out there in the wild. These learnings will help you assess whether our product bets were appropriate so we can adjust our thinking based on its usage and customer reaction.
That’s all for today 🙂
Thank you for reading this far.