Opportunity Mapping 🗺️ Prompts

SUMMARY

Purpose: Opportunity Mapping helps teams align on what problem to solve by surfacing and framing user needs, business goals, and technical constraints.

Design Thinking Phase: Define

Time: 45–60 min session + 1–2 hours analysis

Difficulty: ⭐⭐

When to use:When stakeholder goals clash or lack prioritisationWhen discovery research unearthed many valuable but divergent insightsWhen teams default to solution-first thinking without a clear problem

What it is

Opportunity Mapping is a visual and collaborative problem-framing technique. It lays out user needs, business drivers, and technical constraints to help multidisciplinary teams spot the best-aligning opportunities. It’s often used post-research to synthesise insights and structure thinking around "where to focus."

📺 Video by NNgroup. Embedded for educational reference.

Why it matters

Without framing the right problem, design solutions often miss the mark—even if beautifully executed. Opportunity Mapping connects the dots between user motivation, organisational value, and feasibility. It prevents blind ideation by ensuring everyone works from a common understanding of where value lives.

When to use

• After key user interviews or observational research
• Before a roadmap planning session or sprint goal-setting
• During cross-functional alignment workshops where priorities feel fuzzy

Benefits

• Rich Insights: Helps uncover user needs that aren’t visible in metrics.
• Flexibility: Works across various project types and timelines.
• User Empathy: Deepens understanding of behaviours and motivations.

How to use it

Here’s a simple 5-step flow to run an Opportunity Mapping session with your team:

1. Define the Goal: Start with a clear problem area or design challenge (e.g. “improve onboarding for small business customers”).
2. Gather Inputs: Pull in research insights, customer quotes, business objectives, KPIs, technical direction, and known assumptions.
3. Map Aspects Separately: Create three zones: User Needs, Business Goals, and Technical Constraints. Use sticky notes digitally or physically under each category.
4. Find Overlaps: Identify areas where user needs intersect with business value and are technically feasible. These become candidate opportunities.
5. Refine and Prioritise: Turn overlaps into How Might We… questions. Rank based on impact, effort, or alignment via a team rating exercise.

Example Output

Let’s say you’re working on a mobile banking app for freelancers. Through mapping, the overlap you identified was:

• User Need: Understand quarterly tax and invoice obligations
• Business Goal: Drive daily app engagement
• Opportunity Framed: “How might we help freelancers track estimated tax and payments in a simple, non-technical way?”

This opportunity can now guide design sprints and idea generation with sharper focus.

Common Pitfalls

• Jumping to Ideas Too Fast: Teams often leap to solutions without fully mapping all factors. Keep the focus on framing, not fixing.
• Overloading One Axis: If the User Needs area has 30 stickies and Business Goals has 5, your prioritisation will be skewed. Balance inputs across all areas.
• Lack of Synthesis: Dumping research without clustering thematically dilutes value. Group and reframe before inserting into the map.

10 Design-Ready AI Prompts for Opportunity Mapping – UX/UI Edition

How These Prompts Work (C.S.I.R. Framework)

Each of the templates below follows the C.S.I.R. method — a proven structure for writing clear, effective prompts that get better results from ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, or any other LLM.

C.S.I.R. stands for:

• Context: Who you are and the UX situation you're working in
• Specific Info: Key design inputs, tasks, or constraints the AI should consider
• Intent: What you want the AI to help you achieve
• Response Format: The structure or format you want the AI to return (e.g. checklist, table, journey map)

Level up your career with smarter AI prompts.Get templates used by UX leaders — no guesswork, just results.Design faster, research smarter, and ship with confidence.First one’s free. Unlock all 10 by becoming a member.

Prompt Template 1: “Generate Opportunity Areas from Research Synthesis”

Generate Opportunity Areas from Research Synthesis

Context: You are a UX Lead wrapping up a discovery phase for a [B2C mobile product].  
Specific Info: The research includes survey results, 10 user interviews, and analytics trends across onboarding and feature usage.  
Intent: Identify three problem opportunity areas where user pain overlaps with product or business priorities.  
Response Format: Return a table with three columns: (1) Observed Insight, (2) Opportunity Framed as “How Might We,” and (3) Affected Persona Segment.

If insights seem surface-level, ask for deeper behavioural patterns.  
Propose a next-step framing exercise to prioritise between these mapped opportunities.