Shift your focus from cranking out solutions to pursuing the right opportunities for lasting impact
Joe Fields
In product management, it’s tempting to jump straight to a solution based on a stakeholder flagging a need, or a competitor shipping something shiny and new. Suddenly, your roadmap is packed with features, but are you really moving in the right direction? The key to building successful products lies in the opportunity space, where you decide which problems are worth solving in the first place.
This post explores why anchoring your strategy in validated customer needs is the key to escaping the feature factory. You’ll learn how focusing on opportunities will transform your product conversations, sharpen prioritization, and drive outcomes competitors can’t easily replicate.
Opportunities are validated customer needs, pain points, or desires that create value when addressed. They live in the product discovery space, where the goal is to understand the problem thoroughly before determining an approach. Solutions are the specific ways you choose to address an opportunity, the “how” after you’ve defined the “what. For example:
Opportunity: Remote team leads struggle to understand how their team’s time is allocated.
Solution: Build a dashboard showing time allocation by project.
“The opportunity space is where the magic happens. The better we understand our customers’ unmet needs, pain points, and desires, the easier it will be to develop successful solutions.” — Teresa Torres
A strong product strategy starts here, in the opportunity space, where you decide which customer problems to solve before committing to any feature build.
In many product teams, success is still measured by how much gets shipped and how fast. This “feature factory” mindset, coined by John Cutler, rewards output over outcome, producing feature‑heavy roadmaps and crowded backlogs.
“Value is not about shipping features; it's about solving problems." - Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap
Most teams don’t realise they’re trapped. They measure success in shipped features, celebrate hitting release dates, and race to fill the backlog, all while missing the only metric that matters: did anything change for the customer?
When teams prioritise launching features over deeply understanding and validating customer problems, they often end up building products that look busy, but deliver little meaningful value.
This output‑obsessed mindset fuels a never‑ending cycle of delivery without direction, where shipping becomes the goal rather than solving meaningful problems.
“Move away from output to outcomes.” - Lea Hickman
When you anchor your strategy in problems only you can solve, you deliver outcomes competitors can’t copy.
When you reframe your work around opportunities instead of solutions, the conversation changes entirely. You stop patting yourself on the back for hitting release dates and start interrogating whether the work made a difference:
This shift is more than semantics, it transforms product strategy into an engine for impact. It ensures teams are not just busy, but effective, and that what gets built earns its place by creating measurable value.
The fix? Shift the centre of gravity from solutions to opportunities, a move that changes not just the language you use, but the strategic decisions you make.
When you anchor your strategy to opportunities, you differentiate not by adding shiny new features for their own sake, but through the problems you deliberately choose to solve. This focus forces you to be intentional, identifying the customer needs that, if addressed, will drive real outcomes, rather than reacting to competitors’ roadmaps. If one particular solution underperforms, the opportunity itself still exists, inviting a better‑designed, better‑executed approach. That continuity means your strategic direction isn’t derailed by a single misstep, and it keeps you from sliding into a feature war.
“The opportunities represent the customer needs that, if addressed, will achieve the desired outcome. The solutions, finally, are the products or product capabilities that help solve the customer needs." — Roman Pichler
By orienting around deliberate problem selection, your strategy becomes far more resilient. Features can be replicated; your choice of problems cannot.
Opportunities are only hypotheses until they’re tested in the real world. Validating them requires building a clear picture of the customer’s reality from multiple angles. That means having direct conversations with customers to surface unmet needs and aspirations they may not articulate unprompted.
It involves digging into behavioural data to pinpoint friction points — those silent drop‑offs, abandoned flows, or under‑used features that reveal where the experience breaks down. It also means combing through support tickets and sales call recordings to spot recurring patterns and pain points that might otherwise stay hidden in individual anecdotes.
As Ash Maurya reminds us:
“Fall in love with the problem, not the solution.”
This mindset keeps teams anchored in real customer needs, resisting the temptation to jump to solutions too early. Tools like Timebook can accelerate the process by aggregating insights across channels, tying them to measurable outcomes, and helping you decide where your limited resources will create the most impact. Used within an Opportunity Solution Tree framework, these validated insights become the foundation for prioritising the right problems, and solving them in ways that truly move the needle.
When you commit to opportunities rather than chasing feature trends, you set your product apart in ways that can’t be easily imitated. You stop wasting energy on “me too” features designed only to match a competitor’s checklist, and instead focus on solving the right problems in a way that aligns your entire team around a shared sense of purpose. This not only sharpens decision‑making but also creates a moat—because while features can be cloned, the thinking and prioritisation behind your problem choices are far harder to copy. As Kris Gale puts it:
“The value is in what gets used, not in what gets built.”
Shifting your focus from cranking out solutions to pursuing the right opportunities doesn’t slow progress, it ensures every step moves you toward meaningful impact. It’s the difference between running fast and running in the right direction. By anchoring your work in validated problems, you create solutions that matter, last, and deliver real value.
As Albert Einstein famously said:
“The formulation of the problem is often more essential than its solution.”
