IDENTIFY RISKY ASSUMPTIONS

The key to de-risking your innovation project is not just in identifying your riskiest assumptions - the ones if invalidated would kill your project - but also figuring out which ones are the easiest to test.

The Assumption finder as a prototype testing tool aims at listing down all your assumptions around the idea, narrowed down to and validating them for the idea’s success.

Below are the broader categories of assumptions :

Customer Assumptions

Need Assumptions

Value Proposition Assumptions

Revenue Assumptions

Problem Assumptions

Willingness To Pay Assumptions

Offering Assumptions

Organisational Assumptions

As someone who wishes to create change (and a design thinker), your primary focus must be on the customer first and foremost. It makes sense then that the rest of the assumptions you identify will come from some customer problems you’ve discovered.

🗝️ STEPS

Collect assumptions from the team without judgement or discussion.

Identify key assumptions about desirability, viability and feasibility, the sooner you recognise and evaluate them the more quickly you can act to reduce the risk they pose.

Use your designer tools (sticky notes, icons) to rank these assumptions, based on which you could not do without or which are most likely to be false.

Highlight high-impact, high-uncertain items.

💯 TIPS

As a team, place sticky-notes of risky assumptions made under each of the 8 categories.

Then as a team add a star for the assumptions that are at most risk to the idea completely failing.

Now that you have identified a riskiest assumptions, try to describe what it means with your team. When is the assumption true? Does it depend on something else?

By interrogating your business model and context canvas you will no doubt find even more assumptions and questions to ask

The sooner you find these, the more likely you are to be able to validate them and either move forward or pivot.