If you sit in enough roadmap meetings, you start to see a pattern. Everyone has a feature they care about.
The hard truth is that most teams are not short on ideas. They are short on clarity about which ideas will actually matter to customers. When the wrong features win, you feel it in slower adoption, missed revenue, and churn that is hard to explain.
In my experience, the teams that break out of this cycle are the ones that bring customers into the prioritization process in a structured way. Instead of guessing, they measure which needs are truly most important and where people still feel underserved.
Opportunity scoring is one of the tools we use at Drive Research to do exactly that.
By asking customers to rate both the importance of specific outcomes and their satisfaction with current solutions, you get a clearer picture of where a new product or feature can create real value.
Opportunity scoring is a way to quantify where your product has the most “room to run.”
In practice, you survey customers to rate:
The biggest opportunities sit in that uncomfortable space where importance is high and satisfaction is low. In other words, these are “jobs” customers really care about but do not feel are solved yet.
In our experience, opportunity scoring fits especially well in three moments of new product development:
You are not just asking “Do you like this idea?” You are systematically mapping where the market feels underserved.
Let us make this concrete.
Imagine you are building a new analytics platform for ecommerce brands. Through internal brainstorming and some exploratory interviews, you identify a list of customer outcomes, such as:
In an opportunity scoring survey, each of these becomes a separate statement. Customers rate:
From there, you calculate an opportunity score. Different formulas exist, but the logic is similar:
Our market research company often visualizes this on a simple grid:
Needs in the top left quadrant (high importance, low satisfaction) are your sweet spot.
When we run these studies at Drive Research, we usually present results in three tiers:
The math helps remove some of the emotion from prioritization. Stakeholders can still debate execution, but there is clearer alignment on which customer problems actually deserve attention.
In theory, you could use this framework all the time. But reality, it shines in a few very specific situations.
This is the classic scenario with founder led or product led organizations. The backlog is overflowing with “good ideas,” but no one is sure which ones will really move the needle.
An opportunity scoring survey gives you an evidence based way to say, “Here is what our customers actually care about the most, and here is where they feel let down today.”
Before a significant release or new product launch, opportunity scoring can validate whether the features you are planning to market line up with true unmet needs. Given how many launches underperform, taking time to test fit against customer priorities is often a smart insurance policy.
We see this often with established SaaS platforms and financial services products. Growth slows, competitors catch up, and the team is searching for “the next thing.”
Opportunity scoring gives you a structured lens on where to innovate next, grounded in customer experience rather than internal opinions.
The quality of your opportunity scoring is only as strong as the inputs. Here is how we typically structure these projects.
You want feedback from the people who actually feel the pain you hope to solve. That might be:
When we work with B2B brands, we often recommend splitting the sample by key segments, such as company size or primary use case. That way you can see whether “high opportunity” needs look different for mid market accounts versus enterprise.
❌ This is where many teams struggle on their own. It is tempting to write statements that sound like features:
“A dashboard that sends real time alerts.”
In our experience, outcome statements work far better:
✅ “Get alerted quickly when performance changes so I can respond.”
The more you describe what customers are trying to achieve, rather than how you will solve it, the more transferable and future proof the results become.
A simple gut check: if you completely changed the underlying solution, would this still be a relevant need? If yes, you are on the right track.
Even the most well designed framework can fall apart if the survey is exhausting. A few practical tips:
On our projects, we also layer in data quality checks, such as attention checks and open ended validations, so the final dataset reflects genuine thought.
Once the data is in, the real fun begins. This is where opportunity scoring stops being a research exercise and starts shaping decisions.
We typically begin by ranking all needs by opportunity score, then grouping them into clusters. For example:
In workshops, product teams often find it easier to reason about clusters than to debate whether item 7 should outrank item 8.
An importance versus satisfaction chart is still one of the simplest and most powerful tools in product strategy.
In a recent study for a software client, seeing needs plotted visually made it obvious that the team had been investing heavily in features that sat in the “high satisfaction, moderate importance” zone, while neglecting a handful of high importance pain points that customers felt were still unresolved.
That visual moment can be a turning point in roadmap discussions.
This is the bridge many organizations miss. The opportunity scores themselves are not the deliverable. The decisions and experiments they inform are the real output.
In practice, we encourage teams to map each high opportunity need to at least one of the following:
It is also helpful to label each as a “quick win” or a “strategic bet” so you can balance near term impact with longer term differentiation.
Let us walk through a fictional scenario that mirrors what we see in real projects.
Imagine a mid-sized bank building a new mobile app for Gen Z customers. Internal stakeholders are excited about features like gamified savings challenges and in app financial education content.
During an opportunity scoring study, the team tests a range of needs, such as:
Gen Z respondents rate “quickly lock my card if I lose it” and “easily track spending by category” as both very important and poorly satisfied by their current bank.
The flashy gamification concepts, while interesting, land in the moderate importance range.
The outcome: The bank still moves forward with some differentiated features, but the early roadmap prioritizes rock solid controls and intuitive spend tracking. Marketing leans into safety, control, and visibility, not just “fun” banking.
From a distance, that sounds obvious. In the day to day of internal advocacy and personal preferences, having opportunity scores keeps the team grounded in what customers actually value.
Could you run a lightweight version of opportunity scoring on your own? Sure. Even a scrappy survey can be better than guessing.
But in our experience, teams see the biggest lift when they bring in a partner like Drive Research to:
There is also a broader payoff. Organizations that systematically collect and act on customer feedback tend to see stronger upsell, cross sell, and retention performance over time.
If you are curious what a tailored opportunity scoring study would look like for your product, a simple starting point is to map out the audience and top 20 to 30 needs you want to test.
Drive Research is a market research company that specializes in turning customer feedback into clear, decision ready insights.
If you are weighing a long list of product ideas, we can help translate your backlog into customer friendly outcomes, design the survey, and run a full opportunity scoring study with your target audience.
You receive a prioritized list of opportunities, along with practical recommendations that connect directly to your roadmap.
Reach out to our team to talk through what an opportunity scoring study could look like for your product.
