Increasingly the systems engineering community recognizes that success of many of today's enterprises depends on our ability to effectively reason about and harness Systems of Systems (SoS) capabilities. This paper specifically addresses the challenges in conducting trade‐off analysis for SoS, approaches that help to alleviate these challenges, and identifies opportunities for further development. For large SoS the use of lightweight analysis approaches provides a way to manage the complexity and identify promising options for more detail trade‐off analysis approaches.