We briefly introduced HDD in the last chapter when we discussed the Lean Startup's Build-Measure-Learn cycle.

As with OKRs, HDD is influenced by our organization's vision, mission, and strategic goals. We set the hypothesis at the feature/epic level; this will span multiple User Stories, sometimes across several teams.

A bit like OKRs, we can also cascade the hypothesis through to the team level, adjusting it accordingly to fit into each User Story's context. We can use the same simple template for both the feature/epic and User Story, which is as follows:

The HDD and User Stories are similar in that they focus on an outcome and the people that we're creating that outcome for.

The significant difference between the User Story format and the HDD approach is that while the User Story has an acceptance criterion that often describes aspects of functional and non-functional requirements, the HDD approach has measurable outcomes.

Teams often use the acceptance criterion as the basis for their scenarios for user acceptance testing (UAT). It's possible to augment the HDD approach with an acceptance criterion if our team finds that helpful.