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| Criterion |  Facilitation Timeline |  Decision Making Pre-Mortem |  Product Discovery Smoke Test |  Product Discovery Fake Door Test |
|---|---|---|---|---|
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. | 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. |
Complexitydifferent | Low | Low | Low | Medium |
Timedifferent | 30-90 min | 20–45 min | 1-5 Tage | 1-5 Tage |
Participantsdifferent | 2-12 | Small cross-functional group | Nutzertraffic | Nutzertraffic |
Formatdifferent | Workshop + async | Workshop | Async | Async |
Outputdifferent | Timeline, Milestones, Insight Notes | Risk list, Mitigation plan, Assumption log | Interest Metrics, Conversion Signal, Learning Note | Click Data, Interest Signal, Learning Decision |
Tagsno overlap | TimelineFacilitationSequence | RiskDecisionFailurePlanning | ValidationExperimentsDemandGrowth | ValidationExperimentsDemandDiscovery |