Chapter 11. Box 7: What’s the Most Important Thing We Need to Learn First?
Figure 11-1. Box 7 of the Lean UX Canvas: Learning
Once you’ve prioritized your hypotheses and identified which hypotheses you’re going to test, the next step in the process is highlighting the major risks in each hypothesis. To do this, we ask the first of the two key Lean UX questions: What’s the most important thing we need to learn first about this hypothesis?
When we ask about learning, we’re really having a conversation about risk. We want to uncover all the things that might break our hypothesis. If you’re doing this with a cross-functional team, as we’ve advised throughout the book, you’re going to get at least as many answers to this question as there are disciplines in the room. The software engineers will discuss the complexities of developing the feature. The designers will bring up workflow issues and usability concerns. Product managers will challenge whether it will deliver the business benefits we anticipate. All of these risks are valid, but the ones we want to focus on now are the ones that will render the hypothesis invalid and allow us to move on quickly if we’re wrong.
In the early stages of the hypothesis’s life cycle, the biggest risk is usually related to the value of the solution. Do people need a solution? Will they look for it? Will they try it? Will they use it? Will they find value in it? These are the things that matter early on. If the answer to these questions is “no,” then there’s no need to worry about how we’re going to design or build it. If we’re dealing with a more mature hypothesis, one where the value has been validated and we’ve moved on to the technical implementation, then thinking through things like technical challenges, usability, and scalability become the next logical risks to explore.
Facilitating the Exercise
Generally speaking, this is a conversation. The team sits down to review the hypothesis prioritization and determines which ones it wants to test first. Then ask the question what’s the most important thing we need to learn first about this hypothesis? If the conversation gets stuck, you might choose to brainstorm here, then do some affinity mapping and dot voting. Or you might defer to some member of the team who holds a strong opinion. Generally, this step doesn’t need a lot of process. The point here is to identify the top one to three risks related to this hypothesis, then move on to planning your experiment, which you’ll do in Box 8.
What to Watch Out For
Consensus is nice but not always attainable. If you find that team discussion not reaching a consensus, it’s a clear indication the team needs more information to make that decision. The only way to do that is to make a decision and move forward to Box 8 to create an experiment. In most cases, the product manager can make this call. When you do this, remember that we’re not abandoning these hypotheses, assumptions, and risks forever. We’re simply moving forward with one and, if proven false, will come back to the backlog of hypotheses to do the process again.