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| Criterion |  Product Discovery Smoke Test |  Decision Making Pre-Mortem |  Growth A/B Testing |  Decision Making Assumption Surfacing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Purposedifferent | 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. | 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 two variants compete, discussions quickly decide by taste rather than effect. A/B Testing checks behavior under controlled conditions and separates real improvement from chance or expectation effects. | 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 | High | Low |
Timedifferent | 1-5 Tage | 20–45 min | 1-4 Wochen | 45-90 min |
Participantsdifferent | Nutzertraffic | Small cross-functional group | 1-6 | 2-8 |
Formatdifferent | Async | Workshop | Async | Workshop + async |
Outputdifferent | Interest Metrics, Conversion Signal, Learning Note | Risk list, Mitigation plan, Assumption log | Experiment results, Decision log, Learning summary | Assumption List, Critical Assumptions, Learning Plan |
Tagsno overlap | ValidationExperimentsDemandGrowth | RiskDecisionFailurePlanning | ExperimentsGrowthAnalyticsValidation | AssumptionsRiskDecisionDiscovery |