HYPOTHESIS & EXPERIMENTS MINDSET

A principle concept — and to me the first thing to keep in mind — about Hypothesis Driven Development and Lean Startup is that we are all delusional about our products and we must validate our assumptions. So before learning about discovery techniques, all of us can benefit from training our minds to admit that you should test your assumptions about your product.

In order to maintain this Hypothesis mindset, I always keep in mind 2 things:
1 — Every time you find out that your assumptions about a product or feature is wrong you have saved resources (time and money) by not working on the wrong thing. But this is incredibly hard because it goes against our own biases. So DON’T DO IT ALONE, involve colleagues and especially your users in your validations (super important). Also, think of a negative confirmation of your assumptions as a terrible gift but in fact a great gift.
2 — Classify your assumptions based on 4 categories: Value, Usability, Implementation, Business Viability. This will help you not to overlook your assumptions and pre conceptions about your new product.

lastly, here’s a great tool I’ve been using to map my assumption in a collaborative environment: https://miro.com/miroverse/assumption-jam/

On my next post I’ll dive in the topic of product hypothesis by discussing how to start thinking about the various aspects of a product or feature as continues experiment.