Assumption Map
From our assumption map, the riskiest assumptions that emerged included:
- People will be willing to meaningfully respond to pings from the system (when pinged to answer a question to fill in context, on top of notifications they already got throughout their workday)
- People are comfortable having their in-progress workstreams visible to other teams
- PMs value proactively discovering relevant workstreams across the organization, even when they weren’t previously aware of them or don’t have an immediate need to know about it
Assumptions
Map
Test Cards
Responding to system pings
- We believe that people will meaningfully respond to pings to fill in context for teammates in their org, even if they don’t directly benefit
- To verify this, we will test a prototype with participants, simulate requests asking for missing context about the participant’s current work, and ask participants to respond as normal
- And measure % of participants willing to respond, as well as length and usefulness of responses
- We are right if at least 50% of participants are willing to respond to a relevant request with substantive and useful context
Visibility of work
- We believe that people will be comfortable having their progress workstreams visible to other teams within their organization, even before the work is finalized.
- To verify this, we will show participants a prototype that automatically surfaces summaries of their current workstreams to other teams (mock data), and ask them to review what information they would prefer to keep private.
- And measure the % of participants willing to share their in-progress work, what percentage of information they choose to share versus hide, as well as reasons for withholding any information.
- We are right if at least 50% of participants are comfortable with sharing a meaningful summary of their in progress work with teams without significant changes or restrictions to their current work.
Workstream discovery
- We believe that PMs will use a tool that surfaces related work happening on other teams, and that they’ll come back to it regularly instead of relying only on asking around or searching Slack and docs. We also believe that they’ll find value in workstreams they weren’t previously aware of and don’t have an immediate need for, not just ones tied to what they’re working on at the moment.
- To verify this, we will show participants a prototype weekly digest (mock data) that lists in-progress workstreams on other teams related to their own project, with the owner of each, and offer a “Show me this week’s” button to get the real version. The digest surfaces a combination of initiatives connected to active projects alongside loosely coupled efforts to test utility absent urgent necessity, followed by inquiring about existing discovery methods and preferred delivery frequency.
- And measure the % of participants who click through or sign up for the digest, how many of the surfaced workstreams they say they didn’t already know about, and which ones they would follow up on with the owner.
- We are right if at least 50% of participants click through or sign up, and most of them find at least one relevant workstream they didn’t know about before. Specifically, we define “most” as a minimum of 60% of enrolled users. Additionally, 50% or more should find value in at least one adjacent initiative, with a majority indicating they would review updates on a weekly frequency.
v0 for testing: https://index-prototype.vercel.app/
Drawing from the reading, the assumptions we chose to focus on drew from moments in our key user stories and are small in scope, making them easier and faster to validate with prototypes and surveys. Rather than asking whether people would generally find our features useful, we identified specific user behaviors which require significant action (responding to questions) or changing existing habits (open-ended discovery, not just retrieval).
