Opportunity Sizing for New Product Managers: A Step by Step Guide

Why should I read this?

Let’s say you work on an acquisition product with the goal of enrolling as many high-value users as possible. You partner with six separate stakeholder teams, each one super excited about their great ideas, who rely on you and your team of engineers to execute. You have to balance meeting their expectations with the other feature work that is important to you, the company-mandated strategy work, fixing pesky bugs, and tech debt (the achilles heel of any product team). There’s no way you can do it all…so how will you decide?

What is Opportunity Sizing, and how will it help me?

Opportunity sizing is the best method for determining the KPI lift an idea could have, relative to all the other work in your backlog. It is not a financial report, a thesis, or a promise of performance. Rather, it is a low-effort tool that you should use to quickly assess the impact an idea could have as compared to all the other ideas your team could work on.

Additionally, having a ‘book’ (a shared spreadsheet) of all feature ideas with associated opportunity sizes is a great way to show your stakeholders why you are prioritizing or de-prioritizing their big idea without bias. I used to share my book at every stakeholder meeting and say “I do like Project Zeta, but because it will only impact 12% of our low-value user base, it’s fifth in line for engineering work. If there’s a…