My trimmed-down version of Jeff Patton’s Opportunity Canvas

I’m a huge fan of Jeff Patton’s work and for years I’ve used his Opportunity Canvas — I highly rate it! But over time I’ve often run into very similar friction points with it.

1. The canvas is quite big and it can be a big ask to make people fill it out when coming up with new opportunities across the organization. Many who aren’t well versed in product often struggle completing the canvas and it can often require a Product Manager to help facilitate.

2. Representing your entire ‘Opportunity Backlog’ with the Opportunity Canvas can feel overwhelming — I’ve done it many times before, often with a load of A3 printed canvas’ on the wall and it can sometimes feel like you can’t see the forest through the trees.

3. Not every quadrant is relevant all the time — some are very stable and don't change much, like ‘Budget’.

As such this lead me to trim the canvas down to just 5 core-sections thought many iterations of trial and error. I’ve simply dubbed it, ‘Opportunity Canvas 2.0’.

The Opp Canvas 2.0

The opportunity canvas breaks down into 5 key quadrants:

1. Problem Statement — HMW (‘How Might We’) format.

2. Users and Customers — who’s it for? Specific is generally better here and doesn’t need to be contained to just end-users, depending on your product it may even be internal users for platform/internal product teams.

3. Supporting Data — both qualitative and quantitative data that supports this opportunity.

4. Your Hunch — how do you interpret the data and what your hypothesis as a result?

5. Expected benefits — this is the measurable outcomes you’re hoping for. The benefits are not exclusive to end users, I’d expect to see internal benefits here as well.

This is also generally the order I fill it out in.