Hypotheses in Theso

The core mandate

Hypothesis-driven development stands on-top of the following mandate:

Validate your hypotheses as early as possible.

To validate hypotheses, to chase outcome over output, and to be ruthlessly focused on the core business hypotheses. For a product delivery process, it's not enough to have progress, arrive at some findings or have some success. The core business hypotheses need to be validated - or invalidated - before too many resources are wasted. They need to be turned from an idea to a validated fact as soon as possible.

What is a hypothesis?

In Theso, hypotheses builds the foundational building block in the product discovery cycle.

It generally consists of 5 things:

• The thesis statement
• The benefit if confirmed
• The benefit if disconfirmed
• A KPI and a target confirmation value
• The "big plan": The decided set of actions which will lead to confirmation or disconfirmation of the hypothesis as soon as possible

The Theso multiplier

In Theso, on top of these things a hypothesis can also do more:

• A hypothesis is versioned by its iterations. Changes in assumption, learnings and pivots are clearly recorded and can be revisited at any later point in time.
• A hypothesis can be connnected with the related software releases, as visualized events in the KPI metric graph.
• Hypothesis history and learnings automatically feed into future ideation sessions, and can enrich your AI agents as context.

What is an iteration?

In Theso, an iteration belongs to a hypothesis and versions it at specific points in time. As the idea evolves, iterations mark checkpoints, and let you go back to older versions. An iteration can be generally created based on 5 type of events:

• Customer feedback
• Prototype learnings
• the KPI Metric changed
• the KPI Metric did not change
• Internal feedback

Once you iterate on a hypothesis, the old iteration of the hypothesis is saved for that period in time. The hypothesis stays active, but you can go back into its history, and refer to your early assumptions. You can see how your iterative process unfolds, for true organizational learning.

As an added benefit, talking to customers or getting insights early is clearly recorded in the system as part of an iteration. Teams that are iterating frequently can be celebrated, and they can share their approaches.

What is a KPI?

In theso a KPI is a metric ingested from one of our 700+ connectors. Using metric math, multiple metrics can be combined or subtracted, and we support all major aggregations, like percentile (i.e. p90), average, min, max or sum.

The same KPI can be connected to either one or multiple hypotheses, all targeting the same metric. KPIs in Theso always consists of the metric itself, and the target value the given hypothesis can be measured against.

Why focus on hypotheses?

A business can only thrive, if its underlying assumptions, its core hypotheses are true. This pursuit is precisely what turns ideas into company value, produces knowledge that is unique to your vision, and gives your company the competitive edge. Theso formalizes this hypothesis focus, by putting them at the center of your planning process, rather than making it an accidental outcome.

Devil's advocate

Aren't hypotheses basically epics?

Hypotheses condense Epics into their core idea. Epics themselves as a flexible concept, they are more abstract than that. They could mean many things. In reality, they often end up being a container for task plumbing. Changed, extended and mutated many times. True organizational learning happens, but it's not recorded in the epic.

This is where the more granular approach of Theso has key benefits:

• Key learnings along the way are recorded as iterations, instead of being lost in an epics history.
• Everybody has clarity why an effort is started - and it's not already tied to a solution. Hypothesis and success criteria are clearly defined, but the solution path is open. Knowing the why let's your team address the problem head on. It avoids having things run in the wrong direction.
• Having a KPI defined challenges your engineering team to build things that will have at least some measurable impact. You may not understand everything you engineering team does. But with a measurable metric, you can understand what should be achieved.

Are hypotheses trying to replace epics?

No, not at all. Hypotheses are concerned first and foremost with recording the problem and mission statement, which often remains unclear. It can therefor motivate tasks, stories and even Epics as implementation plans, as approaches to verify an assumption. At the same time, epics and stories don't need to exist with Theso. Hypotheses and sub-hypotheses together with KPIs can form "why?" and "what?", while tasks and issues can from the "how?".

Can we also do hypothesis driven development without Theso?

In short, yes. Theso is not strictly needed to build a more a hypothesis driven development process. Noting down key assumptions, target KPIs and incremental learnings can all be steps towards a more scientific, context-rich development approach. What Theso framework provides beyond that setting the right incentives, integrations and tools, in order to not get trapped in measuring output, and to get to the root of the company's challenges.