![]() ![]() We want to ensure they live up to our expectations. We ship them and then measure their performance. However, we don’t just set and forget these solutions. These are ideas that have a high level of confidence and, based on our experience and expertise, stand a good chance of impacting the business in a positive way. High value, low risk hypotheses don’t require discovery work. These are the hypotheses that deserve that time, attention, experimentation and learning. However, if we get it wrong it also stands the chance of doing damage to our brand, our budget or our market opportunity. Based on what we know right now this is a hypothesis with the chance of having significant impact on our business. Once we’ve completed this process, we assess where each hypothesis landed.Īny hypothesis that falls into this box is one we should test. We take each hypothesis we’ve created to solve a specific business problem and map it onto the HPC’s matrix. At this point we can only guess the impact the idea will have on our business if we design and implement it well. It won’t be until a scalable, sustainable version of the idea launches that we’ll know whether it lives up to our expectations. The key word here is “perceived.” Because this is a hypothesis, a guess, the value we imagine our ideas will have is exactly that, imagined. The vertical axis measures perceived value. Every hypothesis needs to be considered individually. The risk here is market viability and sustainability. Maybe you’re considering moving into an adjacent market after years focusing on a different target audience. You may be reimagining how consumers shop in your store which is risky to your customer’s experience. For example, you may have to integrate modern technology with a legacy back end system. Because of this, your risk assessment will be contextual to the hypothesis you’re considering. The challenge with assessing risk is that every hypothesis is different. This is a team activity and is the collective best guess of the people assembled of how risky this idea is to the system, product, service or business. The horizontal axis measures your assessment of the risk of each hypothesis. It can work with tactical, feature-level hypotheses as well as business model hypotheses and everything in between. ![]() The HPC is designed to work with any hypothesis you come up with. What kinds of hypotheses work with this canvas? You’ve identified an opportunity or problem to solve, declared your assumptions and have come up with ideas to capitalise on the opportunity or solve the problem. If you’re not familiar with it, the HPC comes into play once you’ve assembled a backlog of hypotheses. If you’re familiar with the Lean UX Canvas, the Hypothesis Prioritisation Canvas (HPC) comes into play between Box 6 (writing hypotheses) and Box 7 (choosing the most important thing to learn next). This relatively simple tool and a companion to the Lean UX Canvas can help facilitate an objective conversation with your team and stakeholders to determine which hypotheses will get your attention and which won’t. If you have many hypotheses, how do you decide where your precious discovery hours should be spent? Which hypotheses should be tested? Which ones should be de-prioritised or just thrown away? To help answer this question I’ve put together the Hypothesis Prioritisation Canvas. If you only have one hypothesis to test it’s clear where to spend the time you have to do discovery work. So many hypotheses, so little (discovery) time But, assuming you’ve come up with some good ideas, you end up creating a new challenge for the team. If you and your team can’t complete this template in a way that you believe that’s a good indication you shouldn’t be working on that idea. I like this template because the act of filling it out is the first test of the hypothesis. While there are many templates, the one I’ve been teaching for the past few years looks like this: ![]() The idea is that we write our ideas, not as requirements, but as our best guesses for how to deliver value and with clear success criteria to tell us whether our idea was valuable and we delivered it in a compelling way. One of the core concepts being adopted broadly from this body of work is the hypothesis - a tactical, testable statement used to help us frame our ideas in a way that encourages experimentation, learning and discovery. ![]() Over the past 10 years we’ve been lucky to have a tremendous amount of content, practice and experience shared to help us build and design better products, services and businesses. You can sign up here and join 14k other subscribers.) (Want to get this article in your inbox? I publish one article a month and share it in my newsletter first. ![]()
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