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| Criterion |  Facilitation Timeline |  Decision Making Pre-Mortem |  Product Discovery Smoke Test |  Decision Making Assumption Surfacing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Purposedifferent | When a project, incident, or change process is only remembered in fragments, Timeline brings the sequence back into a readable form. It makes turning points, precursors, and after-effects recognizable over the course of time. | 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. | 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. |
Complexitysame | Low | Low | Low | Low |
Timedifferent | 30-90 min | 20–45 min | 1-5 Tage | 45-90 min |
Participantsdifferent | 2-12 | Small cross-functional group | Nutzertraffic | 2-8 |
Formatdifferent | Workshop + async | Workshop | Async | Workshop + async |
Outputdifferent | Timeline, Milestones, Insight Notes | Risk list, Mitigation plan, Assumption log | Interest Metrics, Conversion Signal, Learning Note | Assumption List, Critical Assumptions, Learning Plan |
Tagsno overlap | TimelineFacilitationSequence | RiskDecisionFailurePlanning | ValidationExperimentsDemandGrowth | AssumptionsRiskDecisionDiscovery |