From small to large organizations, everyone can benefit from coming together and sharing their ideas and concerns about a project. Whether that is a website redesign, a new feature, or an improvement to an existing product, we all have our fair share of ideas and concerns. Conducting an assumptions map workshop can help us align our goals across different departments and provide a shared understanding of our direction.
If you ever hear that your company is launching a new product or redesigning a new website, the best thing to do is bring everybody involved together to get a good idea of how they are thinking about this. Typically, stakeholders from multiple departments can see problems differently or may find one issue more important than the other. With so many ideas and perspectives, the most important thing about all of this is that we have documented it all in an actionable way.
Let us use a new app product as an example. If we are to launch this new product to the market soon, we first have to understand the pro and to do so, we must understand what people using the app are thinking about it.
But it isn't enough to just send out a survey or gather users to interview. Our initial assumptions matter; if used correctly, they can help us understand the problems that users struggle with.
An assumptions mapping workshop needs to be planned out with a decent amount of time allocated for:
Depending on the number of people participating in the workshop, setting up 1-2 hour slots on the calendar is enough time to allow everybody to freely express their ideas and concerns while grouping them together with proper labels that signify the assumption items.
The app we're discussing is designed to help people pay down their student loans more effectively. Stakeholders had a bunch of ideas about the existing app. They thought that it didn't provide financial literacy help, didn't help them relieve their anxiety, felt predatory, had a lengthy onboarding process, and discouraged them from paying it off.
But to be sure that this is true, the assumptions mapping workshop can help put these concerns on a whiteboard, helping us see how we all think about the app and understand which ones can be grouped together.
We feel aligned when we know our thoughts and concerns have been heard. An assumptions map does a great job of making our team feel like we understand one another. It's a great way to build team chemistry around a problem.
The second stage of the assumptions map workshop is to prioritize them by importance and difficulty of validation. Let's use the student loan app project as an example. Under the "Financial Literacy" group, there's a sticky note that says, "People taking out student loans would care about being financially literate." If stakeholders believe that knowing this will positively impact the new app project's success, they can all agree that this is important. If you were to think of ways to validate it, you'd think of user interviews or a general survey. In this case, it doesn't require that much effort. So, this sticky note will go under "Important and easy to validate."
Let's see another scenario. There's a sticky note under student loan pain points that says, "The next president will likely not forgive student loans." If stakeholders unite to place this on the priority matrix, they can agree that this is unimportant to the project's success. They can also agree that this is hard to validate, as we may not know the future president in the next 4 or 8 years. It's safe to say that this sticky note goes under "Not important and hard to validate."
Once all the sticky notes have been placed in their respective quadrants, the workshop organizer can create a working document summarizing the workshop in table format. This document is a place where stakeholders can chime in and see the different methods that can be approached for each assumption item.
All stakeholders can access this document and share each item's notes, comments, and best approaches.
For the sticky note, "People taking out student loans would care about being financially literate." We will test our assumption with a survey by asking them questions about this topic. It can be:
If the survey answers prove that users would appreciate financial literacy help on the app, this will be a huge finding and impact the new app's success. Overall, an assumptions mapping workshop can provide confidence in our assumptions and have them backed by user data. This way, we reduce our chance of getting it wrong and increase the likelihood of success.
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