How do you know you’re making the right bet with your idea? Which bets does the success of your idea hinge on? These are your riskiest assumptions; they need to be tested.
- You want to decide which assumption to validate next
- You are in the early stages of developing an idea or concept
- The stakes are high and the impact of any failure could be catastrophic
- You need to decide which areas to focus and spend resources on for idea validation
- Assumptions Place all your untested assumptions into these middle three boxes.
- Low risk Assumptions that are of low risk or have already been validated are moved up here.
- High risk After evaluation, the riskiest assumption is filtered and placed here.
We’ve all been there: your idea is so great that you’re literally bursting at the seams wanting to launch it as soon as you can (maybe even today!). Most of us feed on this excitement. But how do you know you’re making the right bet with your idea? Which bets does the success of your idea hinge on? These are your riskiest assumptions, and they need to be tested.
Whether you work for a small start-up or an existing large organisation, validate your riskiest assumption as quickly and cheaply as possible so you don’t waste valuable time and resources toiling away at something that likely will never work. But this is often harder than it sounds. How to find your riskiest assumption?
The Riskiest Assumption Canvas is a visual tool used for identifying and ranking the assumptions that your business idea hinges on, i.e., a tool for identifying the 'make or break' factors for your idea. If these assumptions turn out to be true, your idea stands a strong chance of success. If not, it could signify the need for tweaking aspects of your idea or rethinking your approach altogether.
For example, if you're an ed-tech startup planning to launch an innovative e-learning platform, you'll have some assumptions, such as 'students prefer interactive learning content' or 'teachers are willing to create and share their own content'. The success of your platform heavily depends on these assumptions being true. Using the Riskiest Assumption Canvas, you can quickly identify, test, and validate these assumptions to minimize risks.
Let's consider a scenario where you're developing a food delivery app for a specific diet, let's say vegan food. One of your assumptions might be 'People prefer vegan meals'. This assumption holds a considerable amount of risk – because if it's false, then there's no market for your app. Hence, this would be considered a high-risk assumption that needs to be validated before you move forward with development.
In your stack of assumptions, the riskiest one is the first gate. If when testing this assumption it continually comes back as “false,” you don’t get to pass go, you don’t get to collect your $200. This tool will help you rank your assumptions before moving on to experimentation.
The first key to identifying your list of riskiest assumptions is to bring a team together to unpack the idea and brainstorm together.
To identify the assumptions you have made about your business, have a look at other canvases you made, such as your Golden Circle, Design Criteria or Customer Journey. Each of these canvases contains untested assumptions.
Finding the riskiest assumption is not always easy. Discussing assumptions with your team will help to identify the ones to go after. Do this visually so it’s to the point and provides you with the outcome you need! This tool makes it easy for your team to have meaningful discussions on what the riskiest assumption really is, and provides a way to come back to the discussion after validating.
Jenga® is a game where players in turn try to remove blocks from a wooden tower. Each block that’s pulled out may make the tower collapse, but the blocks on the bottom are critical to keeping the tower upright.
Think of your idea as a big Jenga® tower, where all of the bricks are assumptions. When one of the assumptions on the bottom of the stack is invalidated, and the brick is removed, the entire tower may fall. When you remove one from the top, not much will happen.
To make your idea succeed, you need to make sure that the base of the tower is safe. We need to start at the bottom, with what we call the riskiest assumptions. At the moment, all the other assumptions are not important. After all, if the riskiest assumption is incorrect, it may be totally irrelevant to think about any of the others: maybe your idea needs to change completely in the light of the new knowledge!
The goal is to try to make the tower fail fast! So check the bottom-most assumption first, which is the riskiest one. That’s what you’ll want to know more about. If it is right, you can move to the next riskiest assumption. But if it fails, your Jenga® tower falls, and you’ll need to go back to the drawing board to find another approach that works better.
- Identify Assumptions
The first step is to gather your team and brainstorm all the assumptions related to your idea. Assumptions are unproven hypotheses or beliefs that underpin your idea. They could be about your customer's pain points, the proposed solution, the market condition, or even about technology and operations.
Gather the team and spend some time jotting down every assumption on sticky notes – but don't stick them on the canvas just yet!
- Map your Assumptions
After you and your team have listed all the assumptions, it's time to place each one on the canvas. Let each team member stick their notes onto the risk grid on the canvas without any discussion. The grid should be prepared with three levels, symbolizing low, medium, and high-risk assumptions.
- Arrange the Assumptions
Now that the assumptions are mapped, have each team member briefly go over their stickies explaining why they placed them where they did.
Following this, hold a discussion with your team while moving stickies around to check if everyone agrees with the risk levels assigned to each assumption.
- Fundamental Assumptions
Next, go through each assumption again and reconsider its placement. Are there any assumptions which heavily rely on others? Move these ones up. Are there any that are fundamental to the success of your idea? Move these down. The aim is to prioritize and refine the assumptions based on their potential risks and impacts on your project.
After about 15 minutes of this, you should be left with a few at the bottom of the stack. Now, vote with your team on which is the most fundamental. This ends up being your riskiest assumption.
- Describe your Riskiest Assumption
Spend time with your team to go in-depth about your riskiest assumption. Clarify what it means, when it can be considered true, whether it depends on other factors, how can it be made specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound (S.M.A.R.T.).
- Specific: Make the assumption Specific, clearly defining what it entails.
- Measurable: Ensure it's Measurable, with a clear indicator or metric for validation.
- Attainable: Check if it's Attainable, that is, it can be realistically validated within your project's constraints.
- Relevant: Confirm it's Relevant to your project's goals or objectives.
- Time-bound: Set a Time-bound deadline or timeframe for its validation.
This will give you a clear understanding and consensus on what to validate first.
- Next Steps
After identifying the riskiest assumption, design an experiment to test it. Use the Experiment Canvas to structure, execute, and document these experiments.