Opportunity Landscape Grid (ODI)
Type: template
Stage: Stage 2: Positioning Proof
Difficulty: advanced
An Outcome-Driven Innovation prioritization tool — plot customer outcomes on an Importance vs. Satisfaction matrix to identify the high-priority gaps where needs are critical but existing solutions fall short.
Overview
The Opportunity Landscape Grid, based on Tony Ulwick's Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI) methodology, is the most rigorous tool in the Stage 2 toolkit. Where the Strategy Canvas shows you where the market is, the ODI grid shows you where the market is failing — and ranks those failures by how much customers actually care about them. At the advanced level of Stage 2, this is the tool that produces defensible positioning based on quantified market gaps rather than intuition.
The ODI framework
ODI rests on a simple premise: customers don't buy products, they hire them to get jobs done. And for every job, there are a set of desired outcomes — the metrics customers use to measure whether the job is being done well.
The framework:
1. Identify the job the customer is trying to accomplish
2. Identify the desired outcomes — the specific, measurable criteria customers use to evaluate success
3. Survey customers on each outcome: how important is this outcome? How satisfied are you with existing solutions?
4. Plot each outcome on the matrix: Importance (y-axis) vs. Satisfaction (x-axis)
5. Identify the 'opportunity space' — outcomes that are high in importance and low in satisfaction
High importance + low satisfaction = the market is failing at something customers care about. That's your positioning opportunity.
Running the survey
The ODI survey asks customers to rate each desired outcome on two dimensions, using consistent scales:
• Importance: 'When you are [doing the job], how important is it that you are able to [desired outcome]?' Rated 1–5 or 1–10.
• Satisfaction: 'When you use [current solution], how satisfied are you with your ability to [desired outcome]?' Rated 1–5 or 1–10.
For meaningful data: survey at least 30 customers in your target segment. The template provides the survey structure and the matrix plotting calculation.
ODI opportunity score formula: Importance + (Importance − Satisfaction) = Opportunity Score. Outcomes with scores above 15 (on a 10-point scale) represent the highest-priority positioning territory.
Reading the matrix
Four quadrants of the ODI matrix:
• High importance, low satisfaction (top-left) — the opportunity zone. Customers care deeply about these outcomes and current solutions are failing. This is where your positioning should focus.
• High importance, high satisfaction (top-right) — table stakes. Customers need these, and incumbents are delivering them. You must match the incumbents here but you won't differentiate on these dimensions.
• Low importance, low satisfaction (bottom-left) — not worth pursuing. Even if you solved these, customers wouldn't value the solution.
• Low importance, high satisfaction (bottom-right) — over-served. Incumbents are investing in outcomes customers don't care much about. This is where you can reduce investment to fund the opportunity zone.
The positioning argument from the ODI matrix: 'Every other solution in this category has been optimizing for [over-served outcomes]. We've built specifically for [opportunity zone outcomes] — the things you actually care about that nothing else gets right.'
Limitations and realistic expectations
The ODI grid is the most data-intensive tool in Stage 2. To run it properly you need:
• A clear job definition before you survey (use the JTBD workspace first)
• At least 30 survey respondents who are genuinely your target customer
• Consistency in how you phrase desired outcomes (too abstract = unusable data)
At the early stage, it's common to run an informal version: interview 10–15 customers, identify the desired outcomes through conversation rather than a formal survey, and estimate importance and satisfaction qualitatively. The output will be directional rather than statistically rigorous — but directional ODI insight is still more grounded than intuition alone.
Use the formal survey version when you have enough customer contacts to run it properly. Use the informal version as a structured conversation guide in your Stage 1 and 2 customer interviews.