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| Criterion |  Engineering Golden Path |  Product Discovery Pretotyping |  Product Discovery Assumption Mapping |  Product Discovery Smoke Test |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Purposedifferent | When teams need a reliable default path for frequent use, sprawl quickly emerges without any guiding logic. Golden Path bundles the preferred path so good practice becomes easy and deviation becomes deliberate. | Pretotyping clarifies whether a customer problem and solution idea create enough real demand. It separates problem, assumption, solution, and evidence, and captures the result as a pretotyping sketch, test setup, and conversion data. | When assumptions still sit unordered in the room, it weighs uncertainty against leverage. It makes visible which hypotheses should be checked first. | When demand only needs to be roughly verified, it tests interest with minimal effort. It measures whether people would take a next step at all. |
Complexitydifferent | Medium | Low | Medium | Low |
Timedifferent | 1-3 Tage Setup, laufend | Stunden bis wenige Tage | 45-60 min | 1-5 Tage |
Participantsdifferent | 2-8 | 1-4 | 2-8 | Nutzertraffic |
Formatdifferent | Workshop + async | Workshop + async | Workshop + async | Async |
Outputdifferent | Golden Path Guide, Templates, Quality Checks | Pretotyping sketch, Test setup, Conversion data, Go or no-go decision | Assumption map, Test backlog, Risk ranking | Interest Metrics, Conversion Signal, Learning Note |
Tagsno overlap | EngineeringProductivityGovernance | ValidationDemandMVP | AssumptionsRiskExperimentsValidation | ValidationExperimentsDemandGrowth |