What is the assumption buster template?

Every product or business owner has made critical assumptions to begin the process of bringing their invention to market. If you’re building a delivery robot, your primary assumption could be that people want to order their food online and have it delivered via robot. If you’re launching a luxury spa, you’re assuming you’ll have enough customers to make a profit. Assumptions are simply built into the early stages of ideas.

While assumptions are impossible to avoid, knowing which assumptions are critical—in other words, which assumptions that, if wrong, would ruin your entire plan—is key to understanding how to mitigate risk. Once you understand your most critical assumptions, you can take action.

That’s where the assumption buster template comes in: It transforms critical assumptions into an action plan, which then helps you test your assumptions and learn from them.

How to use the assumption buster template in Lucidspark

1. First, state your most most critical assumption as determined by the critical assumptions template, and plot this in the “Riskiest assumption” container.
2. Then, form your hypothesis: State what you must do to create change to make the assumption true. In the template this is the, “If we ___ then __% of customers will ___.”
3. Next, complete the build, measure, and learn process. Build a minimum viable product (the smallest possible version of your product or business), and then build an experiment to test it. You can use an experiment map template to help.
4. Finally, measure what behaviors were observed in your experiment and learn from your findings. Use Collaborator Colors and emojis to work with your team to answer the following questions within the appropriate circles: Did you validate your assumptions? What do you have to change/implement to make a change? What behaviors did you observe?