Hypothesis Statement
What is a Hypothesis Statement?
This tactic tests your assumptions, treating each of them as experiments by turning them into hypotheses.
Take the subjective and political conversation out of the decision-making process, and focus the team towards feedback from users and customers.
Before this tactic, collect and prioritise your assumptions with Assumption Collecting and Assumption Map. Afterwards, create a Prototype Persona to give you direction on who to test with.
Hypothesis Statement Miro Template
How to write a Hypothesis Statement
1. As a group, put your riskiest and most unproven assumptions into this hypothesis template:
Because we saw [quantitative/qualitative insight] we believe [this assumption statement is true].
We will know we’re [right/wrong] when we see the following feedback: [qualitative feedback] and/or [quantitative feedback] and/or [key performance indicator change].
2. Your hypothesis may be too big to test with a single statement, so it can be helpful to use this format to break it down into smaller parts:
We believe that [doing this/building this feature/creating this experience] for [these people/personas] will achieve [this outcome].
We will know this is true when we see [this market feedback, quantitative measure, or qualitative insight].
3. Get the group to Secret Vote on the hypotheses they’d like to commit to.
Origin: Jeff Gothelf & Josh Seiden, 2016
Not sure if this is the right approach for your team at the moment? Try a different framing tactic. Or, if you feel confident in how you articulate the challenges you face, move on to an idea generation workshop to help your team come up with foolproof solutions.
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Hypothesis Statement is one of 54 workshop recipe cards inside the Workshop Tactics card deck.
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