Identify Assumptions New

What Is This?

Overview

Identify Assumptions New is a structured skill for surfacing and categorizing the risky assumptions embedded in a new product idea before significant resources are committed. It extends the four core product risk categories established by Teresa Torres in Continuous Discovery Habits, which cover desirability, viability, feasibility, and usability, by adding four additional dimensions: Ethics, Go-to-Market, Strategy, and Team. This expanded framework gives product teams and founders a more complete picture of where their thinking may be fragile or untested.

The skill is designed to be used early in the product lifecycle, when assumptions are plentiful and validation is still cheap. By making implicit beliefs explicit and organizing them into eight named categories, teams can prioritize which assumptions carry the most risk and decide where to invest discovery effort first. This prevents the common failure mode of building confidently on foundations that were never verified.

The output of this skill is a structured assumption map that can feed directly into experiment design, stakeholder conversations, or investment readiness reviews. It is not a scoring tool or a decision engine. It is a thinking aid that forces honest articulation of what a team believes to be true and has not yet proven.

Who Should Use This

• Product managers evaluating a new concept before committing to a roadmap
• Startup founders preparing to pitch or seeking early validation signals
• Innovation leads inside larger organizations assessing internal venture ideas
• Product designers who need to understand risk before investing in prototypes
• Investors or advisors conducting lightweight due diligence on early-stage ideas
• Researchers and strategists mapping the uncertainty landscape of a new market entry

Why Use It?

Problems It Solves

• Teams often proceed with product development while holding unexamined beliefs about customer behavior, market size, or technical feasibility, leading to expensive late-stage failures.
• Standard risk frameworks focus narrowly on product-level concerns and miss strategic, ethical, or organizational risks that can kill a venture just as effectively.
• Assumption mapping is frequently skipped because teams lack a consistent structure to guide the conversation, resulting in incomplete or biased risk identification.
• Without a shared vocabulary for risk categories, cross-functional teams talk past each other when assessing whether a product idea is ready to pursue.

Core Highlights

• Covers eight distinct risk categories for comprehensive assumption coverage
• Extends the proven Torres framework with Go-to-Market, Strategy, Ethics, and Team dimensions
• Produces a structured, shareable assumption map as output
• Applicable at the earliest stages of product thinking, before any build begins
• Supports prioritization by making assumptions visible and comparable
• Works for both startup contexts and internal innovation programs
• Integrates naturally with experiment design and discovery planning workflows
• Encourages honest articulation of beliefs rather than optimistic projection

How to Use It?

Basic Usage

To invoke this skill in a compatible AI-assisted product management environment, use a prompt structured as follows:

/identify-assumptions-new

Product idea: [describe the product concept in 2-4 sentences]
Target customer: [describe the intended user or buyer]
Problem being solved: [state the core problem]

The skill will return a categorized list of assumptions across all eight risk dimensions, with each assumption stated as a falsifiable belief.

Specific Scenarios

Scenario 1: Pre-seed startup evaluation. A founder with a B2B SaaS concept uses the skill before building any prototype. The output surfaces a critical Go-to-Market assumption that enterprise buyers require procurement approval cycles longer than the runway allows, prompting a pivot to SMB customers.

Scenario 2: Internal innovation review. A corporate product team proposes a new service line. Running the skill reveals an unexamined Team assumption that the required machine learning expertise exists internally, which it does not, changing the build-versus-partner decision.

Real-World Examples

A health tech startup uses the skill to identify an Ethics assumption that users will consent to passive data collection, which regulatory review later confirms requires explicit opt-in flows. Catching this assumption early saves three months of rework.

A consumer app team discovers a Viability assumption that a freemium model will convert at industry-average rates, despite targeting a demographic with historically lower conversion behavior.

Important Notes

Requirements

• A clearly articulated product idea with at least a basic problem statement
• Some understanding of the intended customer segment
• Willingness to state beliefs honestly rather than defensively
• Access to a compatible AI-assisted product management tool or workflow that supports the skill