The Market Opportunity Navigator
The Market Opportunity Navigator is designed to help you get a clear overview of your potential market domains and make confident decisions on where to play next.
To set a promising business strategy, you need to discover your available market opportunities, assess their attractiveness and choose which ones to focus on.
The Market Opportunity Navigator guides you through this 3 step process with a visual, easy to apply framework.
Three dedicated worksheets help you to ask the right questions and make your best choices apparent.
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STEP 1
Generate your Market Opportunity Set
Your core abilities or technologies can create different offerings for different types of customers. Uncovering your landscape of opportunities is challenging but crucial.
A varied set of market opportunities is an asset in and of itself, as it increases your chances of focusing on the most promising option. It also provides the basis for plan-B, if required, and for unlocking new growth opportunities over time.
Worksheet 1 will help you to:
- Understand the general functionalities of your core abilities
- Discover new applications and customer segments
- Get a wide-lens perspective beyond your industry boundaries
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STEP 2
Evaluate Market Opportunity Attractiveness
Market opportunities can vastly differ in their attractiveness. Yet evaluating and comparing options is often an overwhelming task, with the need to generate one clear pattern from endless bits of information.
A systematic evaluation process makes sure that you haven’t forgotten any key consideration, and allows you to visually map your options and compare them. It provides the basis for team discussions so that you are less susceptible to biases and intuition.
Worksheet 2 will help you to:
- Assess the value creation potential of each market opportunity
- Estimate the overall challenge in capturing this value
- Map out your opportunities to better grasp their upsides and downsides
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STEP 3
Design your Agile Focus Strategy
Market choice requires commitment which may lock you in. Yet playing in an uncertain world demands flexibility to make sure you can pivot and adapt over time. Balancing this delicate tension between focus and flexibility is challenging, especially for resource-scarce ventures.
By consciously keeping related options open, you can mitigate your risk and avoid a potentially fatal lock-in. This Agile Focus Strategy helps you to bake agility into the DNA of your venture, and has significant implications for how you build and design your company.
Worksheet 3 will help you to:
- Clearly define the primary market opportunity that you will focus on
- Design a smart portfolio of backup and growth options to keep open
- Say 'no' to all other options
Integrate your learning with other Lean tools
The Market Opportunity Navigator complements and reinforces other great business tools such as the Business Model Canvas, the Value Proposition Canvas or the Lean Startup Methodology.
These tools tell you how to rapidly find product/market fit inside a market, and how to pivot when your hypotheses are incorrect. However, they don’t help you figure out where to start the search for your new business.
This is exactly why the Navigator is a key addition. It provides a wide-lens perspective to find different potential market domains for your innovation, before you zoom in and design the business model or test your minimal viable products. This framework can act as the front-end of Customer Development. It helps figure out the most promising starting position – market domain – for your customer development process and figure out where to play before zooming in on how to play.
Read more about this on Steve Blank’s article:
How to stop playing market roulette - a new addition to the lean toolset >