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| Criterion |  Decision Making Assumption Surfacing |  Decision Making Trade-off Analysis |  Architecture Request for Comments |  Product Discovery Assumption Mapping |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Purposedifferent | Plans often contain assumptions that were never openly stated and remain dangerous precisely because of that. Assumption Surfacing makes these silent premises visible and prioritizes which of them carry the initiative or could sink it. | With limited resources, quality, speed, cost, and risk almost always compete with each other. Trade-off Analysis makes these tensions explicit and prevents decisions from producing hidden side effects. | An RFC clarifies architecture context, options, and consequences. It structures technical context, alternatives, tradeoffs, open questions, and review feedback, and captures the result as an RFC document, reviewer comments, and a decision rationale. | When assumptions still sit unordered in the room, it weighs uncertainty against leverage. It makes visible which hypotheses should be checked first. |
Complexitydifferent | Low | Medium | Medium | Medium |
Timedifferent | 45-90 min | 45-120 min | 1-3 Wochen vom Draft bis zur Entscheidung | 45-60 min |
Participantsdifferent | 2-8 | 2-8 | 3-20 Reviewer | 2-8 |
Formatdifferent | Workshop + async | Workshop + async | Async | Workshop + async |
Outputdifferent | Assumption List, Critical Assumptions, Learning Plan | Trade-off Matrix, Criteria List, Decision Rationale, Accepted Downsides | RFC document, Reviewer comments, Decision rationale, Follow-up ADR or tickets | Assumption map, Test backlog, Risk ranking |
Tagsno overlap | AssumptionsRiskDecisionDiscovery | TradeoffsDecisionCriteriaOptions | ArchitectureDecisionAsyncGovernance | AssumptionsRiskExperimentsValidation |