Show acceptable alternatives
When an exact result is impossible, explain which requirement could change and what becomes available if it does.
- Evidence
- Context-dependent. The reasoning is sound and the outcome genuinely depends on your business, your customers and your production. Worth testing rather than adopting wholesale.
- Difficulty
- Moderate. Difficulty is an initial editorial assessment of how much work an idea usually takes, not a guaranteed estimate for your systems. A change that is small in one storefront can be significant in another because of where the data lives.
The commercial problem
A request fails and the customer is shown either nothing or an unexplained list of loosely related products. Neither tells them the one thing they need: which of their requirements was the blocking one.
Why it matters
Customers routinely hold requirements they would relax if they knew the cost of holding them. Nobody can make that trade without being told which constraint is binding, and a related-products carousel does not tell them.
Where it applies
- Filtered catalogues with many dimensions
- Configurators with interacting constraints
- Made-to-order products with minimum quantities or size limits
Suggested implementation
- Determine which single requirement, if relaxed, opens the most valid outcomes.
- State it plainly: this combination is not available because of X, and here is what is possible at Y.
- Offer the alternative as a comparison against what was asked for, not as a replacement presented without explanation.
- Let the customer keep the original requirement and register it as unmet, rather than forcing a substitution.
Risks and constraints
- Suggesting alternatives that ignore the customer's actual constraint reads as not listening, and is worse than an honest no.
- Relaxing a requirement the customer cannot relax wastes their time and yours.
- Computing near-miss alternatives can be expensive in a large or highly constrained catalogue.
What to measure
- How often an alternative is taken up rather than dismissed
- Whether customers who see an alternative continue rather than leaving
- Which requirement turns out to be binding most often, which is itself a product finding
How this relates to Specify
Acceptable alternatives are one of the fields a Structured Opportunity records, alongside what is known and what remains unknown.
Related ideas
Start with evidence
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