Opportunity Assessment

---
name: opportunity-assessment
description: Assess a product opportunity from customer problem, evidence, market context, strategic fit, alternatives, value, feasibility constraints, risk, and learning cost before committing to a solution.
---
# Opportunity Assessment

Use when deciding whether a problem or market opportunity deserves product investment.

## Procedure
1. Define the customer or user problem, affected segment, current workaround, frequency, severity, and evidence that the problem is real.
2. Describe the desired outcome without assuming a specific feature or implementation.
3. Review market structure, alternatives, switching behavior, strategic fit, and whether the opportunity reinforces or distracts from the product's direction.
4. Estimate potential value and reach using ranges and evidence proportional to the decision.
5. Identify constraints and dependencies across technology, operations, distribution, trust, regulation, data, and organizational capability as relevant.
6. Compare credible approaches including doing nothing, improving an existing capability, partnering, or a smaller test.
7. Identify the highest-uncertainty assumptions and the cheapest research, prototype, or experiment that could resolve them.
8. Recommend pursue, explore, defer, or reject with rationale and conditions that would change the decision.

## Decision rules
- Assess the opportunity before falling in love with the proposed feature.
- Large markets do not compensate for weak customer pain or poor strategic fit.
- Unknowns should create learning tasks, not imaginary certainty.
- Opportunity size, feasibility, and strategic value are separate dimensions.

## Quality gate
The assessment is ready when the problem and evidence are clear, alternatives and strategic fit are considered, value and constraints use honest ranges, critical assumptions are visible, and the recommendation includes the next learning or investment decision.