Opportunities

An opportunity is something the product could take on: a user problem together with the business benefit of solving it, held as one unit of consideration. It is what a story map is for — you decide whether to pursue an opportunity before you map the journey that serves it.

Opportunities are Markdown files with YAML frontmatter, stored in the opportunities/ directory. Their canvases are YAML files stored in discoveries/opportunity-canvases/.

Format

---
name: Opportunity display name
---

Whose problem this is, and what the business gets from solving it.

The name field is a short label — it is what the filter chips and the navigation show. The body is the opportunity itself: the sentence saying whose problem it is and what solving it is worth. This is the same split a story makes between its name and its narrative, and it is there for the same reason — a label fits on a card, a statement does not.

Name the opportunity, not the subject area it sits in. “Collaborative discovery” names a topic; “stale discovery” names something you could decide to fix. The topic already has a home — it is what the story map is called, and a map and its opportunity are free to carry different names precisely because they answer different questions: the map says which journey was drawn, the opportunity says why anyone drew it.

The opportunity key is derived from the filename (without .md), and must be kebab-case. Key uniqueness is enforced by the filesystem.

Example

opportunities/collaborative-discovery.md:

---
name: Stale discovery
repos:
  - boykush/livt
---

Discovery outcomes sit in the board tool and go stale. The raw record is rough, and
nothing versions it or checks it for consistency. Transcribing it, refining it into a
fair copy, and keeping it updated as rules change saves re-running the same argument
and lets the outcome stand as the specification.

Any frontmatter field beyond name is kept and shown as metadata, and a field whose value is a URL renders as a link — the same treatment story frontmatter gets.

The opportunity canvas

The Opportunity Canvas holds an opportunity on a single sheet. It is a discovery session’s outcome, so it lives in discoveries/ beside the story maps and example mappings, and it joins its opportunity by filename:

opportunities/collaborative-discovery.md                        # the opportunity
discoveries/opportunity-canvases/collaborative-discovery.yaml   # its canvas

This is the same filename join an example mapping makes with its story, and it carries the same meaning: either file can exist without the other. An opportunity with no canvas has not been thought through yet; a canvas with no opportunity file still renders.

Format

canvas:
  solution-ideas:
    - A specific product, feature, or enhancement idea
  problems:
    - A problem users have today
  users-and-customers:
    - Who has that problem
  solutions-today:
    - How they address it now
  business-challenges:
    - What those problems cost the business
  user-value:
    - What users will do with the solution
  user-metrics:
    - What you could measure to show they did it
  adoption-strategy:
    - How they discover and adopt it
  business-impact:
    - Which business metrics move
  budget:
    - What you would spend to find out

ubiquitous:
  - term-key

Every box is a list, because a box on a canvas holds sticky notes rather than a paragraph. Keeping them apart is what lets the board render one card per idea, the way it sat in the room.

Every key is optional. A box left out renders as an empty box on the sheet rather than disappearing from it — a blank box is the visible record of a question the opportunity has not answered yet, and that is worth seeing.

ubiquitous is optional and works exactly as it does on the other boards: each entry is a ubiquitous language term key, rendered as a pink sticky below the sheet.

The ten boxes

The numbers are the order Jeff Patton recommends filling the boxes in. The zones are how the sheet is laid out, which is a different thing: the facts on the left, the solution down the middle, the assumptions about value on the right. Reading the sheet left to right walks back from the idea to the problem it solves, then forward to the value it would create.

The split is the point of the canvas — what you can go and check sits apart from what you are only assuming until the thing ships.

Linking a story map

A story map serves an opportunity when its filename key matches:

opportunities/collaborative-discovery.md          # the opportunity
discoveries/usm/collaborative-discovery.yaml      # the journey mapped for it

No field connects them; the filename does, as everywhere else in livt. When the two match:

• The story map board names its opportunity, and links to it
• Every story on that map carries the opportunity’s name on its chip, and the chip links to the opportunity’s page
• The Stories, Example Mappings, and Tasks lists filter on that name

A story map whose key names no opportunity file keeps working exactly as it did before opportunities were files of their own: the map stands in as its own opportunity, named by the map. Nothing has to be migrated.

Where opportunities sit

Opportunity  ──▶  Story Map  ──▶  Story  ──▶  Example Mapping
   why, and         the journey     what one     how it must
   whether at all   that serves it  person does  behave

An opportunity is deliberately allowed to sit alone. One with no story map is one that has not been taken on — still a candidate, or decided against. livt records no status for this: whether the map exists is the record, the same way a rule’s automation is recorded rather than inferred.