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| Criterion |  UX Research User Interviews |  Decision Making Pre-Mortem |  Architecture Request for Comments |  Decision Making Assumption Surfacing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Purposedifferent | When teams derive needs only from assumptions and real motives are missing, user interviews give direct access to behavior and meaning. Conversations from the target group's everyday life make patterns, tensions, and open questions solidly visible. | 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. | An RFC clarifies architecture context, options, and consequences. It structures technical context, alternatives, tradeoffs, open questions, and review feedback, and captures the result as an RFC document, reviewer comments, and a decision rationale. | 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 | Medium | Low |
Timedifferent | 30–60 min per interview | 20–45 min | 1-3 Wochen vom Draft bis zur Entscheidung | 45-90 min |
Participantsdifferent | 1 participant per interview | Small cross-functional group | 3-20 Reviewer | 2-8 |
Formatdifferent | Workshop + async | Workshop | Async | Workshop + async |
Outputdifferent | Interview Notes, Themes, Insight Summary | Risk list, Mitigation plan, Assumption log | RFC document, Reviewer comments, Decision rationale, Follow-up ADR or tickets | Assumption List, Critical Assumptions, Learning Plan |
Tagsno overlap | QualitativeResearchCustomerDiscovery | RiskDecisionFailurePlanning | ArchitectureDecisionAsyncGovernance | AssumptionsRiskDecisionDiscovery |