Opportunity Evaluation And Judgment

Opportunity Evaluation & Judgment

Purpose

Structurally assesses the viability of an identified opportunity before resources are committed to it — the deliberate, evaluative counterpart to the noticing done in market-and-signal-scanning and the connecting done in pattern-and-analogy-connector.

Anchored in research

• Tang, J., Kacmar, K. M., & Busenitz, L. (2012), "Entrepreneurial Alertness in the Pursuit of New Opportunities," Journal of Business Venturing, 27(1), 77–94 — evaluation and judgment, the third of the paper's three dimensions of entrepreneurial alertness (alongside scanning-and-search and association-and-connection, which anchor ../market-and-signal-scanning/SKILL.md and ../pattern-and-analogy-connector/SKILL.md respectively). Evaluation and judgment is the deliberate weighing of a noticed opportunity against criteria such as feasibility, risk, and fit — distinct from the earlier, more intuitive noticing and connecting stages.
• SFIA (Skills Framework for a Digital World) — Business Situation Analysis, a professional skill definition describing the systematic investigation of a business situation or problem to identify options, risks, and success criteria before a course of action is chosen.

Method

1. State the opportunity as a testable claim, not a description. Before evaluating, restate the opportunity as a specific claim that could turn out to be false (e.g. "Segment X will pay for Y because Z"), not just a general description of an idea — evaluation only works against a claim that's falsifiable.
2. List the criteria the opportunity will be judged against, decided in advance rather than picked to fit the answer you already want: typically market viability, technical/operational feasibility, resource fit, strategic fit, and risk exposure. Keep the criteria list stable across opportunities you're comparing, so judgments stay comparable.
3. Gather the evidence available for each criterion, and be explicit about the strength of that evidence — a validated customer interview is not the same class of evidence as an internal assumption. Where evidence is missing, mark it, don't fill the gap with a guess ([assumption — verify]).
4. Apply deliberate judgment, separated from the initial noticing. This is the step Tang, Kacmar & Busenitz's model is built around: consciously switch from "does this feel promising" (the alertness that got you here) to "does this hold up against the stated criteria" — the two are different cognitive modes, and collapsing them tends to let excitement about the pattern override an honest look at the evidence.
5. Identify the single biggest point of uncertainty — the one assumption that, if wrong, would most change the conclusion. Naming it explicitly turns the evaluation into an actionable next step (test that assumption) rather than a static verdict.
6. Produce a structured verdict: viable / viable with named conditions / not viable as currently framed — each with the reasoning that led there, so the next reader can see why, not just what.
7. Route the outcome onward. A "viable" or "viable with conditions" result feeds into ../opportunity-value-assessment/SKILL.md (or this pack's own scoring, once the owner's version is filled in) for a fuller, two-dimensional assessment.

What this skill does NOT do

• Doesn't make the final decision for you — it produces a structured draft to support a human decision.
• Doesn't confirm figures, market data, or competitor data from memory — it uses the inputs you provide, or clearly flags an assumption ([assumption — verify]).
• Doesn't make a binding go/no-go call — it structures the criteria for the decision-maker.
• Doesn't skip straight to judgment without first stating the opportunity as a testable claim and naming the evaluation criteria — doing so invites post-hoc rationalization of a conclusion already reached informally.

Refinement notes

Areas to keep deepening with real practice:

• your own rules of thumb and heuristics for this technique
• concrete templates (into ../../references/)
• reference cases / your own examples
• what this skill deliberately does not do (guardrails, common mistakes) — add to the list above

Once this section is filled in and validated in practice, update the maturity field in skills_index.json to draft, validated, or canonical (see ../../../meta/maturity_levels.md). Don't add new fields to the frontmatter — name and description are the only ones allowed (see ../../../meta/frontmatter_schema.md).

Continue from here

• Next in this pack: ../market-sizing-tam-sam-som/SKILL.md — Quantitatively sizes the market and the genuinely reachable share of it.
• The owner's validated, productized version of this same task: ../opportunity-value-assessment/SKILL.md — a concrete 2D matrix + 7-lens assessment, maturity: validated.
• A ready-made skill chain for this situation: see ../../../playbooks/
• This pack's shared guardrails: ../../CLAUDE.md

References

• ../../references/ — the pack's shared background material
• ../../CLAUDE.md — this pack's shared guardrails