Assumption Map
Assumptions Mapping is a team exercise where desirability, viability, and feasibility hypotheses are made explicit and prioritized in terms of importance and evidence. To understand the risk and uncertainty of your idea you need to ask: “What are all the things that need to be true for this idea to work?” This will allow you to identify all four types of hypotheses underlying a business idea: desirability, feasibility, viability, and adaptability.
- Desirability: Does the market want this idea?
- Feasibility: Can we deliver at scale?
- Viability: Is the idea profitable enough?
- Adaptability: Can the idea survive and adapt in a changing environment
Use the Business Model Canvas, Value Proposition Canvas and the Idea Canvas to identify the assumptions. Then, use the Assumption Matrix to prioritize the assumptions.
This helps you plot your assumptions and helps focus on the important ones. Plot the 2x2 axes. Here:
- x-Axis (Evidence): We use the labels of “have evidence” and “no evidence”. It’s about having observable evidence, qualitative or quantitative, to support the hypothesis.
- y-Axis (Importance): On the y-axis we use the labels of “important” and “unimportant”. You may be thinking that you have only written down the important hypotheses, so this is redundant. However, not everything is the most critical. By asking yourself “which hypothesis, if proven wrong will cause our business idea to fail” you’ll be able to determine which are the most important.
Another version is:
Focus on the top right quadrant for experimentation. The hypotheses in the top right quadrant contain your beliefs that are critical for success and yet have the least amount of evidence to support them. You’ll want to focus near term experimentation here, instead of working on things that are unimportant and already have evidence. This is how you can focus on experiments that matter.