How to Tame your Unruly Opportunity Solution Trees

Your OST starts simple enough. You have a clear business objective, a neat user journey, and a handful of opportunities you've identified through research. Everything fits nicely on one canvas, and the relationships are clear.

Then reality hits:

• New research reveals more opportunities

• You uncover alternative journey flows

• Multiple personas have distinctly different needs

• Business objectives evolve

Before you know it, your once-pristine tree looks more like an overgrown jungle. The core value of Opportunity Solutions Trees, their actionability, is fading as the clear hierarchy you started with has become a complex web of interconnections.

Four Strategies for Taming Your Trees

1. Enforce Clear Parent-Child Relationships

One of the easiest ways to reduce clutter in your OST is to group your opportunities into parent-child relationships. When opportunities are organised hierarchically, each “parent” node represents a broad opportunity or problem, and “child” nodes break down specific sub-opportunities. And you can keep nesting opportunities as many times as needed.

By grouping related opportunities you can make it much easier to see the logical flow of opportunities. This approach not only keeps your tree tidy but also improves the clarity of how individual opportunities and solutions align with broader goals.

Examples:

Parent Opportunity: “The sign-up process was confusing, and I almost gave up halfway through.”

• “There were just too many screens before I could even start using the app.”

• “I wasn’t sure how many steps were left, so I felt like I’d be onboarding forever.”

• “I would have liked an option to skip some parts and come back to them later if I wanted.”

Parent Opportunity: “I get lost trying to find the features I use the most in the app.”

• “I’d love a way to bookmark or favorite certain features to find them faster.”

• “A search bar that brings up tools would help—I’m tired of scrolling through everything.”

2. Merge Duplicates (with Caution)

As you continue to do interviews, duplicate opportunities are going to arise. Merging duplicates is a great way to keep your tree concise, but it’s essential to be cautious. Opportunities that look alike may, in fact, represent distinct insights or ideas. Always verify that two nodes are truly the same before merging them.

A simple tip is to ask would merging these lose important nuance? If so, then leave them separate.

Examples:

Can be merged.
These both relate to controlling the number of notifications

• “I wish I could set how often I get notifications—it feels like I get too many.”

• “The daily notifications are too much for me. I want to be able to control them more.”

Should not be merged
While these both refer to notifications they represent different user needs; avoid distractions versus increase engagement.

• “I want to control how often I get notifications because it’s distracting during work hours.”

• “I’d like notifications that remind me to come back to the app on weekends when I’m free.”

3. Split Trees By Objective

While we should already create a separate Opportunity Solution Tree for each core business objective it is worth validating that you have not merged multiple objectives into a single tree. This can be a quick and simple way to reduce the complexity of the tree.

You should align with the objectives defined by the product team for the current period (e.g. quarter).

4. Split Trees by Persona / Job

The final approach for simplifying your tree is to separate out different personas or jobs-to-be-done. Often the needs are unique, so keeping trees specific to each persona will make it easier to draw insights and prioritise solutions relevant to each group.

For example, in airlines, you might have different personas for business travellers, status seekers, family coordinators, budget explorers and comfort travellers. These would each have quite distinct journeys with different needs and desires. You could increase the the airline conversion rate by targeting any of these personas but it would make one tree too complex to be actionable. By separating them out we can make each tree more actionable.

Managing Multiple Trees: The New Challenge

While splitting your OSTs can make each one more actionable, it also creates a new challenge: you now have multiple trees to maintain. You can end up with dozens of trees: # of objectives multiplied by # of personas / jobs.

This is where it is critical to really understand the product strategy and current objectives. Focusing on a sub-set of personas will make your research more effective as well as reduce the overhead of managing different trees.

While this can keep our current number of active trees under control, there is still a problem with the number of trees growing over time. Objectives change, and new personas or jobs become more important. This can lead to hundreds of trees over time.

Learning to Let Go

Not every tree will need to be kept forever. While personas tend to stay consistent over time their needs do not. Business objectives and priorities also shift over time. This constant change makes some trees obsolete. For trees tied to objectives that are no longer part of your strategy, it’s perfectly fine to delete them.

Deleting might sound scary and you might prefer to archive them. But when archiving, ask yourself: Will I realistically revisit this tree in 1-2 years, and will it still be accurate? Will it take more time to re-validate that all of these opportunities are still valid?

The purpose of continuous research is to stay connected with customers and their most pressing challenges. Most teams are not short of ideas, they are short of good ideas. Rebuilding the tree will not take too much time and it will have higher quality insights.

Conclusion

Opportunity Solution Trees are powerful tools for connecting research insights to product decisions, but they require active management to remain useful. By enforcing clear relationships, being thoughtful about merging opportunities and splitting trees where appropriate, you can keep your trees functional and valuable.

Remember: the goal isn't to create perfect, permanent trees. The goal is to maintain useful tools that help your team make better decisions now. Sometimes that means letting go of branches—or entire trees—that no longer serve your current objectives.