Use Your Story Maps to Generate Assumptions

Now that your product trio has a clear concept of what your idea means, you can use your story map to uncover hidden assumptions. Throughout your story map, every time you assume that an end-user will do something, you are making desirability assumptions (i.e., that your user wants to do what you are asking them to do and that they are willing to do it), usability assumptions (i.e., your user understands what needs to be done and is able to do it), and feasibility assumptions (i.e., you can build whatever is required to support each step of the map). You can literally go step by step through your story map and generate dozens of assumptions.

Let’s return to our example to see how this works. From our first step of the story map, “Our subscriber comes to our platform to watch sports,” we can generate the following assumptions:

• Desirability: Our subscriber wants to watch sports.
• Desirability: Our subscriber wants to watch sports on our platform.
• Usability: Our subscriber knows they can watch sports on our platform.
• Usability: Our subscriber thinks of our platform when it’s time to watch sports.
• Feasibility: Our platform is available when our subscriber wants to watch sports.

From our second step, “Our platform has live sports options for our subscriber to choose from,” we can generate the following assumptions:

• Desirability: Our platform has the sports our subscriber wants to watch.
• Usability: Our subscriber can find where to go on our platform to find sports.
• Feasibility: We know what sports are available right now.
• Feasibility: We can display what sports are available right now.

From our third step, “Our subscriber chooses a sport that is currently on a local TV channel,” we can generate the following assumptions:

• Desirability: Our subscriber wants to watch a sport that is on a local TV channel.
• Usability: Our subscriber can find the sport they want to watch.
• Usability: Our subscriber knows how to select and play the sport they want to watch.

From our fourth step, “Our local channel provider’s content is available,” we can generate the following assumptions:

• Feasibility: The local provider’s source content will be available.
• Feasibility: We can display the content from our local provider.
• Desirability: The content we display is what the consumer wanted.

From our fourth step, “Our subscriber watches live sports,” we can generate the following assumptions:

• Desirability: The subscriber likes what they chose.
• Feasibility: The stream works well enough for the subscriber to enjoy live sports.
• Usability: The interface doesn’t detract from watching the sport.

Sometimes story maps can help us uncover viability and ethical assumptions as well. For example, this story map might help us realize that we are making the following viability and ethical assumptions:

• Viability: Integrating a local channel feed won’t be too expensive.
• Ethical: Subscribers will be okay with us sharing viewership data with their local channels.

However, you’ll learn more specific techniques for highlighting viability and ethical assumptions in the coming sections.

From a simple 5-step story map, we generated 20 assumptions.

Now if you are feeling overwhelmed, don’t worry. Assumptions aren’t bad. If we’ve done our discovery homework (e.g., continuous interviewing, opportunity mapping, etc.), we’ll understand our customers’ context well, and most of our assumptions will be true enough. You’ll see, later in this chapter, that we won’t even bother testing most of them. However, by taking the time to generate many assumptions, we’ll increase the likelihood that we’ll uncover the risky ones. Later in this chapter, you’ll learn how to prioritize and identify the riskiest assumptions.