01.5 · Capability in Discovery

Opportunity validation

Testing whether an opportunity is real before investing in it. Cheap experiments that produce evidence instead of opinions.

Map6 skills

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6 skillsClick a hexagon to set your status

01.5.1Assumption mappingListing what must be true for an idea to work and ranking the risky parts.
01.5.2Evidence strengthTelling strong evidence from weak signals and opinions.
01.5.3Desirability testsExperiments that check whether people actually want something.
01.5.4Willingness to payFinding out whether, and how much, people would pay.
01.5.5Landing-page testsDescribing a product on a page and measuring who signs up.
01.5.6Concierge and Wizard of Oz testsDelivering the service by hand before automating it.

Mark all 6

Where to start

3 resources

articleStart here
Assumption testing: everything you need to know to get started ↗
Teresa Torres (Product Talk) · 2023 · 20 min
How to break an idea into its assumptions and test the riskiest ones quickly, before building.
articleStart here
Two MVPs every product manager should know, and how to tell them apart ↗
Mind the Product · 2026 · 8 min
The difference between a concierge test, where customers know it is manual, and a Wizard of Oz test, where they do not.
articleStart here
Review: The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick ↗
Yevgeniy Brikman · 2023 · 7 min
An engineer's summary of the most useful short book on customer conversations, with the questions that get honest answers.

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