Assumptions are dangerous (and they can make a silly donkey out of you and me). It’s important to identify and explicitly list out all of the assumptions you are making.
You might start with an assumption board exercise, but the next steps: prioritisation and validation tracking are just as important.
View Assumptions Tracker template in Google Sheets
Remember to File > Make a copy
Priotisation
Not all assumptions are equal. Some might have higher risk to your business, and some you will be less confident about. It’s important to prioritise which assumptions you want to validate (or invalidate) first.
We recommend ranking based on
- Risk: The riskiness of the assumption to our business
- Confidence: The confidence level in the assumption. Important: High confidence has a lower score
Validation tracking
Now that you have a prioritised list of assumptions, the most important step is ahead of you: Validating or invalidating each assumption.
A light-weight tracker is built into the second tab of the template. You want to document how you will test each assumption as well as what outcome defines ‘validated’ or ‘invalidated’.
