Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value

by Teresa Torres

Avoid These Common Anti-Patterns As you work to identify the hidden assumptions behind your ideas, be sure to avoid these common anti-patterns: Not generating enough assumptions. Generating assumptions, like ideating, is intended to be a divergent exercise. The goal is to identify as many “gotchas” as you can to increase the chance that you generate the riskiest ones. However, many teams dramatically underestimate how many assumptions underlie their ideas. When I do these exercises, I often generate 20–30 assumptions for even a simple idea. If that sounds overwhelming, remember, you won’t need to test all of these assumptions. Most of them will be harmless. You’ll use the assumption-mapping exercise to quickly find the riskiest ones. However, if you don’t generate the riskiest assumptions, the mapping exercise won’t help you sort something that you haven’t uncovered. Use the five assumption categories and the exercises in this chapter to help you generate as many assumptions as you can. Phrasing your assumptions such that you need them to be false. Generating assumptions can be a bit of a devil’s-advocate exercise. You are looking for what might go wrong with your ideas. As a result, you might be tempted to phrase your assumptions negatively. For example, if you need your users to log in to your service, you might phrase your assumption as, “Customers won’t remember their password.” However, this is backwards. You need customers to remember their password for your idea to ...

Antipatterns to look out for