Assumptions and Risks

Imagine an app that automatically summarizes every meeting.

It sounds useful.

But hidden inside the idea are several assumptions.

An assumption is something you are treating as true without enough evidence yet.

For the meeting-summary idea:

Users have trouble remembering decisions.

People will trust an automatic summary.

The system can identify important decisions accurately.

Companies will allow meeting audio to be processed.

Any one of these could break the product.

A simple way to think about risk:

Desirability

Do users care?

Usability

Can they use it?

Feasibility

Can we build it well enough?

Viability

Does it make sense for the business?

You do not need to memorize the labels. Use them to find weak assumptions.

Suppose engineering can build the summary system.

Great.

But if users do not trust AI-generated decisions, technical feasibility was not the biggest risk.

Testing the easiest assumption first can create false confidence.

Instead of building the whole product, you might:

1. create summaries manually
2. send them to users
3. see what they correct or ignore
4. learn whether the output is genuinely useful

That tests desirability and trust before major engineering work.

Ask:

What must be true for this idea to succeed?

Then:

Which of those things are we least sure about?

That gives you a much better starting point for discovery.

Every product idea contains assumptions.

Find the assumption that could kill the idea and learn about it early.