How opportunity sprints can help you discover the value in your next innovation

Why opportunity sprints can help boost your next innovation

The U+ opportunity sprint methodology is designed to ensure that every new innovation has the best possible chance of success on the market, right from the very beginning. Using this framework, organizations can formulate value hypotheses, conduct actionable market research, and create high-level prototypes in a matter of weeks.

The opportunity sprint begins with an initial discovery phase, usually lasting about a week. During this time, our teams focus on understanding a new product's value proposition, mapping user stories, and onboarding onto internal systems. We conduct workshops on value proposition and market positioning, along with market research activities.

The subsequent phase involves discovery iterations and prototyping, spanning approximately three weeks. We iterate the value hypothesis, create a pitch deck, and conduct customer testing, all the while facilitating collaboration through workshops, meetings, and daily standups.

The deliverables at the end of this phase include:

• Value hypothesis statement,
• Customer persona profiles,
• Customer journey profiles,
• Insights from customer testing,
• Figma and non-code prototypes,
• Business case with a pitch deck.

These deliverables serve as a solid basis for decision-making, enabling innovation leaders to make crucial choices regarding the reasons and methods for moving forward with a new venture.

Let’s now take a closer look at two cornerstones of the U+ opportunity sprint methodology: customer journey mapping and user interviews.

Customer journey mapping

A key aspect of the U+ opportunity sprint is customer journey mapping. This process helps you understand where your customers are coming from, how they feel in each of their critical touchpoints with your product, and what drives their behavior. The focus is on understanding what you can do to make life easier for the customer – from start to finish.

This activity also enables you to assess what we call the four I’s:

• Insights: how to understand the customer experience better
• Impact: how to optimize budgets and effort for changes you want to make to the customer experience
• Issues and opportunities: how to diagnose the existing customer journey and pain points
• Innovation: where you might want to completely change the existing customer experience

By assessing user journeys objectively and diagnosing potential areas of friction, our teams can address these issues and transform them into opportunities for improvement. This approach ensures that innovators can identify customer pain points, and remain open to a complete overhaul of customer experience, if necessary.

User interviews

Nobody is able to articulate your user’s problems like your users can.

As part of the opportunity sprint, we talk to customers and learn more about their needs and preferences. This can be done through interviews conducted in person or online, or by gathering a group of people together for a discussion if individual interviews are not feasible.

The research process is divided into two main steps. First, we define the specific group of customers we want to analyze and create a plan for how to gather information from them. This includes figuring out how many people we need to talk to, what our overall goals are, and what characteristics we're looking for in the participants. We also take into account information from market and competitor research that we've already done and use it to guide our approach.

The second step involves creating a set of questions to guide the interviews or group discussions. We also develop a framework for organizing and analyzing the data we collect during the research process.

Before we finalize the interview questions, we consider the insights we want to gain and the assumptions we want to test. This ensures that we gather relevant and useful information from the customers.

Conclusion

The 4-week opportunity sprint process helps innovation leaders quickly establish a clear idea and gauge its potential value, gather basic market research to support a business case, and create a simple prototype. This approach allows for focused development and provides valuable insights for validating assumptions and making informed decisions. By condensing these activities into a short timeframe, the process allows innovation leaders to make efficient and important decisions, increasing the chances of success for new ventures.

The U+ Method can efficiently and effectively lead the development, implementation, and improvement of innovations in any sector. To date, we have used this method to bring 100+ products to market, creating over $2 billion in value for Fortune 1000 companies. Check out U+ success stories here.