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| Criterion |  Decision Making Trade-off Analysis |  Decision Making Pre-Mortem |  Product Discovery Assumption Mapping |  Decision Making Assumption Surfacing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
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. | 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 assumptions still sit unordered in the room, it weighs uncertainty against leverage. It makes visible which hypotheses should be checked first. | 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 | Medium | Low | Medium | Low |
Timedifferent | 45-120 min | 20–45 min | 45-60 min | 45-90 min |
Participantsdifferent | 2-8 | Small cross-functional group | 2-8 | 2-8 |
Formatdifferent | Workshop + async | Workshop | Workshop + async | Workshop + async |
Outputdifferent | Trade-off Matrix, Criteria List, Decision Rationale, Accepted Downsides | Risk list, Mitigation plan, Assumption log | Assumption map, Test backlog, Risk ranking | Assumption List, Critical Assumptions, Learning Plan |
Tagsno overlap | TradeoffsDecisionCriteriaOptions | RiskDecisionFailurePlanning | AssumptionsRiskExperimentsValidation | AssumptionsRiskDecisionDiscovery |