It’s often more fruitful to consider what evidence would disprove your hypotheses and what are the simplest things you could do to collect it?
Spend Some Time On How To Disprove Your Hypotheses
There is a strong temptation for founders to prioritize their efforts on the basis of “What is the simplest thing we could do here to prove this hypothesis about our product or our business?”
It’s often more fruitful to consider what evidence would disprove your hypotheses and what is the simplest thing you could do to collect it?
Focus on past behavior and actual situations and events to bound the problem. Don’t focus on hypothetical, potential, or future problems. Or at least don’t explore them until you are confident that there is a clearly defined business need or critical capability that they are looking for today. Walk through actual situations and events to develop a model for the costs and impact of the problem on their current business.
Your two key goals are learning and laying the groundwork for a business relationship. Your mindset should embrace focused curiosity and appreciative inquiry. When you hear something that contradicts one of your important assumptions, resist the temptation to reject it. Say, “tell me more about that” instead. When they describe a practice or process that does not make sense or does not match your expectations, assume that they have a good reason and dig in to understand it.
Karl Popper calls this falsifiability and suggested that it was basis for any sound hypothesis.. You would be surprised how many product hypotheses cannot be disproved, in particular if you can’t define when you have disproved a key hypothesis you will ultimately accumulate enough “evidence” to convince yourself that you have proved it.
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