Sizing a Future Market Opportunity

Executive Report and Guidelines

Digital commerce · Opportunity sizing

Putting a credible number, and honest assumptions, behind a future opportunity before committing to it.

Role

Project Lead

Context and objective

A promising opportunity, still unquantified

A digital commerce platform saw a promising future opportunity but had not put a number on it, and leadership needed a credible size, and the reasoning behind it, before committing resources to build. The strategic context was a real, near-term investment decision resting on a market that was neither.

The objective was to be rigorous about something that did not fully exist yet, and honest about the uncertainty rather than hiding it inside a single confident figure. Success looked like a number leadership could actually trust.

Approach and key insights

How the work unfolded

As Project Lead, I owned the work end to end, framing the opportunity around the specific decision it needed to serve and directing the analysis. I anchored the estimate in market data and adjacent evidence, modelled the size from explicit, arguable assumptions rather than a single guess, and connected it to the underlying forces that would move it up or down. Working directly with leadership, I facilitated the conversations that stress-tested the assumptions, and delivered the estimate as an honest range with a clear sensitivity view.

The insight that mattered was that a number is only as good as its assumptions, that trends move the estimate rather than leaving it fixed, and that an honest range serves a decision far better than false precision.

Duration

8 weeks

Industry

Digital commerce

Engagement

Opportunity sizing

Timeline

2025

Deliverables

What was produced

The deliverables made both the number and the reasoning behind it visible, so leadership could weigh the opportunity honestly.

Strategy Framework