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| Criterion |  Decision Making Trade-off Analysis |  Decision Making Constraint Analysis |  Product Discovery Assumption Mapping |  Decision Making Pre-Mortem |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Purposedifferent | With limited resources, quality, speed, cost, and risk almost always compete with each other. Trade-off Analysis makes these tensions explicit and prevents decisions from producing hidden side effects. | When an initiative stalls, the limit often lies not in the idea but in hard or soft boundary conditions. Constraint Analysis separates these limits and shows which of them can actually be shaped. | When assumptions still sit unordered in the room, it weighs uncertainty against leverage. It makes visible which hypotheses should be checked first. | 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. |
Complexitydifferent | Medium | Low | Medium | Low |
Timedifferent | 45-120 min | 30-90 min | 45-60 min | 20–45 min |
Participantsdifferent | 2-8 | 2-8 | 2-8 | Small cross-functional group |
Formatdifferent | Workshop + async | Workshop + async | Workshop + async | Workshop |
Outputdifferent | Trade-off Matrix, Criteria List, Decision Rationale, Accepted Downsides | Constraint List, Hard/Soft Classification, Option Impact Notes, Decision Boundaries | Assumption map, Test backlog, Risk ranking | Risk list, Mitigation plan, Assumption log |
Tagsno overlap | TradeoffsDecisionCriteriaOptions | ConstraintsDecisionPlanningOptions | AssumptionsRiskExperimentsValidation | RiskDecisionFailurePlanning |