Testing Assumptions

Clarifying Assumptions and Expectations

To begin, it’s useful to document your own assumptions and expectations. That way you can test whether they’re realistic. Assumptions are beliefs you have about how people behave or how things work. Expectations are beliefs you have about how people will behave or how things will work given certain conditions. Assumptions are about how things are now or how they were in the past. Expectations deal with the future. Both types of beliefs need to be tested because they act as the foundation for decisions you make.

The benefit of drafting these lists of assumptions and expectations is that they give you material to begin testing. Your customer research and early product experiments can serve as tests to validate or invalidate your early beliefs. Once you’ve validated or invalidated your initial assumptions and expectations, you’ll be on firmer ground to further develop your venture.

Note: If you’re working as part of a team, each team member should write down his/her own assumptions and expectations. That will help you learn about each other’s beliefs. It will also help uncover shared assumptions and spotlight differing expectations.

Assumptions

Before you launch any form of your product or service, start by listing your assumptions. It can be challenging because assumptions are by definition things you assume to be true. You therefore may not even be aware that they are assumptions.

If you’re developing a newsletter service for new fathers, for example, you might start with the following list:

Many dads are anxious about the challenges of fatherhood.
Many dads are looking for useful, relevant information.
Much of the parenting information published is aimed at women rather than men.

Exercise: Put Your Assumptions On Paper

Jot down what you assume to be true. Make as long a list of assumptions as you can in five to 10 minutes. These should be assumptions that you yourself hold, not necessarily stereotypes or beliefs others have. Aim for a list of somewhere between 10 and 20 assumptions. Then take five more minutes and narrow down your list to three to five of the most important.

Expectations

You also probably have some expectations in mind, along the lines of the following:

If new fathers are exposed to a newsletter with quality info relevant to them, a significant percentage will be open to giving it a try.
If new fathers are invited to join social channels, more than 5% of those I reach will join in to see whether there is value in the information and discussions there.
Many new fathers may be reluctant to attend in-person events because they have limited available time. However, special events that allow fathers to attend with kids—and give mothers time off— may be of interest to more than 5% of the dads invited to take part.

Exercise: Write Down 5 Expectations

Make a list of your expectations. These are different than assumptions in that expectations convey what you expect will be true if you take some particular set of actions. Write down five expectations you have about what will happen if you create a particular piece of content, a product or service, or something else intended to be of value to a particular community. Try to be as specific as possible so that you’ll be able to test your expectations with a feasible real-world test.

Testing Your Hypothoses

Once you have your initial list of key assumptions and expectations, the next step is to test them. For each assumption, think about what facts could provide validation or disprove your belief. Where could you find such facts? Sometimes it’s a matter of simple research, looking up data or reading studies on the subject. In other cases, you can speak with experts who have relevant information at their fingertips.

For instance, for the assumptions related to the newsletter for new fathers idea, we could draw on data collected on attitudes about fatherhood. Or we might refer to data on new fathers’ media consumption or time allocation. Or we could interview researchers with expertise in this domain. In other cases, we can test our assumptions by conducting field interviews.

Keep in mind that this is not the same as field testing your product or service. At this stage, you’re simply gathering information and building your own understanding of your subject matter and community. You aren’t asking people about your own product or service, because your focus is on them, not on you.

Here’s a card you can fill out for each of your core assumptions to streamline your testing.

When you’ve tested your assumptions, it’s time to move on to test your expectations. You’ll find that you may have to conduct experiments to validate your hypotheses. What kind of experiments? An experiment can be something as simple as launching a Facebook group and measuring the response in your target group. Or sending out a newsletter to 50 recipients and measuring the open rate and the percentage who click on links. Or hosting an event and measuring attendance, participation and satisfaction. The key thing is that an early experiment should be something you can do quickly, easily and cheaply. That way you can revise your hypotheses efficiently, if necessary. Or you can move on to follow-up steps, proceeding through the early launch process.

Sometimes you’ll be able to find market data for similar products or services to help validate consumer interest. In most cases, though, the context for those existing products or services may be different enough that you’ll want to run tests for your own offering. Fortunately, running tests in this new social-digital-mobile era is easier than ever before. You can create an opportunity without a heavy investment of time, effort, skill or money and get quick input by observing user response.

At this phase you’re not asking a lot of users, so the process can be a relatively light lift for all involved. You’re engaging users in their existing environments (Facebook, email, local events, etc) without asking for extensive effort, money or time. Eventually you may offer users more value in exchange for some of their time, money or effort, but in this early stage you’re simply validating that there are itches they’d like to scratch. In other words, you’re beginning to validate that there’s a potential need you may be able to satisfy. You’re on the way toward establishing that you’ve identified a genuine opportunity.

There are several advantages to testing your expectations before you invest a great deal of time, effort or money. First, assuming you learn from your tests, you can make product adjustments before the ink has dried, as they say. Because you haven’t sunk a lot of effort or expense into hard coding a site or app, for example, you can easily change the product characteristics or features. Second, through the validation process you get some practice reaching your community.

As your product evolves, you’ll benefit from having a method in place for gauging whether your product/service benefits your users. You’ll also get a sense of whether you enjoy working on the opportunity you’ve identified. You’ll need to derive satisfaction to persist through difficult patches. Finally, if your tests reveal that you may be heading toward a dead end, you can cut losses quickly. Or if you’ve identified a major pain point, you will gain real-world validation that will provide valuable momentum as you develop your venture.