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| Criterion |  Decision Making Pre-Mortem |  Product Discovery Smoke Test |  Product Discovery Fake Door Test |  Decision Making Assumption Surfacing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Purposedifferent | In early initiatives with many uncertainties, planning quickly turns too optimistic. A pre-mortem makes the expected failure visible in advance and sharpens the view of causes, gaps, and countermeasures. | 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. | When demand is still unclear, it measures interest in a feature before it is built. It separates real behavior from polite agreement and deliberately keeps build effort small. | 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. |
Complexitydifferent | Low | Low | Medium | Low |
Timedifferent | 20–45 min | 1-5 Tage | 1-5 Tage | 45-90 min |
Participantsdifferent | Small cross-functional group | Nutzertraffic | Nutzertraffic | 2-8 |
Formatdifferent | Workshop | Async | Async | Workshop + async |
Outputdifferent | Risk list, Mitigation plan, Assumption log | Interest Metrics, Conversion Signal, Learning Note | Click Data, Interest Signal, Learning Decision | Assumption List, Critical Assumptions, Learning Plan |
Tagsno overlap | RiskDecisionFailurePlanning | ValidationExperimentsDemandGrowth | ValidationExperimentsDemandDiscovery | AssumptionsRiskDecisionDiscovery |