Assumptions, products and people

By now lots of us are familiar with the Assumption mapping exercise you can run when starting a discovery phase for a new product/service or even a new feature. It’s something I would always recommend doing and probably one of the most important concepts for people to get their heads around when creating new things.

It’s a way of generating all the assumptions we make about products and giving ourselves the opportunity to test or validate those, before we commit to building anything.

We often assume what users are interested in, how they want to engage with what we’re building. That they even want to engage in the first place.

Some of these assumptions are high risk and could mean failure for a product or service if they turn out to be false. These are the ones that need to be validated first, by talking to existing or potential users or by investigating technical possibilities.

In my experience the types of assumptions we make about each other can be just as important and potentially risky to the success of a team (think about the team as a product in itself that you want to be the best it can be)

The kinds of assumptions we make in our teams

• A stand up at 9am suits everyone
• Engineers aren’t really interested in creative work
• The team is really motivated by drinks on a Friday

Some of those seem quite light hearted and probably don’t mean much on the surface but there are also dangers when assumptions and biases come together.

Assumptions that can hold people back

• They seemed disengaged in that retrospective, they clearly aren’t a collaborator
• They aren’t too technical — not interested in the finer detail
• This person wouldn’t be interested in presenting to the client, they seem nervous
• They keep being late, they don’t care

Most of our assumptions have never been proven, yet we believe them to be true and sometimes use them discount people for opportunities they might be perfect for. Not only does this hold people back from career progression, it also means that the team isn’t being the best it can as not everyone is able to contribute in the best way.

Assumptions can also lead to misunderstandings and a lack of communication, because you think you already know the answer or understand what is going on. There have been many occasions that I’ve noticed people not connecting with each other in the best way because they have some preconceived notion about what the other thinks about them.

Why we make these assumptions

There’s lots of things you can read about unconscious bias and why we’re hardwired to pre judge people.

• We base things on our past experiences
• We tend to think that people that look like us, think like us (and people who don’t, don’t)
• Our brain is trying to be helpful (thanks brain!) and wants to help us get to a solution more quickly, especially if we are under pressure

It’s worth noting that we ALL do this and it can be really difficult to notice, but just like in product development, being aware of the assumptions you make is the first step to making things better.

So what can we do about it?

There are lots of things you can do as part of building or growing a team to bring out the types of assumptions you can hold about people. This could be through feedback, or something more structured. It’s also great to invite people to write things about themselves and offer up parts of them that you might not see. Manual of me is a great example of this.

On a personal note, try to be more aware of when an opinion about someone is based on an assumption — especially if you are influential in that person’s career. Get used to challenging what you think. Remember that in times of stress you are more likely to make dangerous assumptions about people.

As much as you can, try to validate your assumptions while you’re in the moment . There’s no point in wasting time thinking something that isn’t true so take the time to check out what you’re thinking e.g. “I’m assuming you’re not interested in coming to our design meeting because it’s not your thing but let me know”, or “you look a bit disinterested, is everything ok?”

Pay extra attention to working relationships with people you know the best. And the people you don’t know the best — why is that?

Challenging your assumptions is a learning experience for you about others, but also reminds you about yourself — what are the common things that you assume about others? how can you challenge that?

This is another blog from the archive, I think I first thought about this concept in 2016 and turned it in to a workshop for Agile Manchester in 2018