Map how important an outcome is against how satisfied users are with it today. The gap — high importance, low satisfaction — is where your biggest opportunities hide.
▸ Try the interactive toolOpportunity Scoring, from Tony Ulwick's Outcome-Driven Innovation, maps how important a specific outcome is to users against how satisfied they are with existing solutions. The gap between high importance and low satisfaction reveals the biggest investment opportunities — the outcomes users care deeply about but feel underserved on.
The insight is that importance and satisfaction are different axes, and only their combination is actionable. A highly important outcome users are already satisfied with is a poor investment (you'd be improving something that's fine); an unimportant outcome is a poor investment regardless. The sweet spot is important + unsatisfied — and Opportunity Scoring measures it at scale rather than guessing.
Opportunity = Importance + max(Importance − Satisfaction, 0)
Survey users on each outcome's importance and their satisfaction with it (both 1–10). High importance + low satisfaction = high opportunity.
Teams routinely over-invest in outcomes users already find satisfactory and under-invest in the ones that quietly drive churn. Opportunity Scoring exposes both.
| The shortcut | What it costs | What it gives you instead |
|---|---|---|
| Improving the already-good | Effort poured into outcomes users are already happy with. | Satisfaction axis flags where improvement adds little — it's already fine. |
| Guessing at priorities | “I think users want…” with no data. | A survey quantifies importance and satisfaction across the user base. |
| Feature-led thinking | Prioritising features instead of outcomes. | Outcomes are stable; features are guesses about how to serve them. |
| Missing silent gaps | High-importance, low-satisfaction outcomes that nobody complains about loudly. | The opportunity score surfaces them mathematically. |
List the outcomes users are trying to achieve, phrased as measurable results (“minimise the time to…,” “increase the likelihood that…”). Not features, not vague satisfaction.
Ask users to rate each outcome's importance and their satisfaction with how they achieve it today — both on a consistent scale. Apply the survey-design principles from Tool 08.
For each outcome, importance plus the (capped) gap to satisfaction. High scores are important outcomes users feel underserved on.
Plot importance vs. satisfaction. The high-importance / low-satisfaction quadrant is your opportunity zone; high-importance / high-satisfaction is “defend, don't invest.”
Direct discovery and roadmap effort at the top-scoring outcomes — then use other tools (interviews, prototypes) to figure out how to serve them.
A team assumed speed was their key opportunity and kept optimising it. An opportunity-scoring survey showed speed was rated highly important — but also highly satisfied. Users were happy with it. The real gap was a different outcome: confidence that their work was correct, rated important and badly underserved.
They'd been pouring effort into a strength while a quiet, high-importance gap drove churn. No one had complained about it loudly, so it had stayed invisible until the two-axis survey surfaced it.
The deliverable is a scatter of outcomes on two axes, with the opportunity zone highlighted.
| Importance | Satisfaction | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| High | Low | Opportunity — invest here |
| High | High | Defend — keep it good, don't over-invest |
| Low | Low | Ignore — users don't care |
| Low | High | Over-served — consider redirecting effort |
Importance tells you what users care about; satisfaction tells you where you're already winning. Only the gap tells you where to invest — and the gap is rarely where the team assumes.
Opportunity Scoring's discipline is thinking in outcomes, not features. Outcomes are stable and user-owned; features are your guesses about how to deliver them. By scoring outcomes, you find where to invest without prematurely deciding what to build — leaving the solution space open for discovery, exactly where the VPC and prototyping pick up.
“Satisfaction with the dashboard” locks in a solution. Score the underlying outcome the dashboard serves.
Importance alone leads you to optimise things users are already happy with. The gap is the point.
Opportunity scores from a dozen unrepresentative users are false precision. Respect sampling.
The score tells you where, not how. Follow it with interviews and prototypes.
Both find underserved needs; the VPC does it qualitatively, Opportunity Scoring quantifies it at scale.
It's a specific survey — importance vs. satisfaction — and lives or dies on clean question design.
Top-scoring outcomes become high-Impact, high-Confidence candidates for RICE.
Outcomes are the measurable edges of jobs — JTBD names the job, Opportunity Scoring sizes the gaps within it.
Pick a product and two outcomes it helps you achieve. Rate each: how important to you (1–10), how satisfied you are with it today (1–10).
Find the one with the bigger importance-minus-satisfaction gap — that's where you'd want the product to improve, even if you've never explicitly asked for it.
The biggest opportunity is usually the gap you've quietly tolerated, not the feature you've loudly requested.