What is it? Start At The End is a simple exercise to identify a set of assumptions which must be tested in order achieve a long term goal. It’s a rather simple exercise, which asks participants to describe what success looks like for their work, and use this to define the goal of the effort. We default to 12 months, but it can be longer or shorter. Then, the exercise asks participants to imagine all the ways their project can fail, and using the results to enumerate key questions or assumptions that must be examined at the start of the work.

What is it? This is a randomised experiment in which we compare and evaluate the performance of different versions of a product in pairs. Both product versions are available in production (live) and randomly provided to different users. Data is being collected about the traffic, interaction, time spent and other relevant metrics, which will be used to judge the effectiveness of the two different versions based on the change in user’s behaviour.

What is it? Multivari, aka Multivariate or Multi-variable testing, is a product testing approach, which allow teams to understand influence of multiple different factors on the product performance. If you have many factors (potentially) influencing the performance of a product, an A/B testing approach will take enormous amount of tests and time, because you can only test the difference of the product performance with two different values of a particular factor (A and B) at a time.

What is it? Premortem is an analytical / thought experiment technique, which is frequently used for risk management, strategic or product decision evaluation. To apply it a group of people is brought together to a meeting. In that meeting, almost as a game, people have to imagine a point in the future where the project has drastically failed and think up different reasons why that might have happened. The method originates from Gary Klein (HBR article) and was made popular by the Nobel price winner Daniel Kahneman in his book “Thinking Fast and Slow”.

So what is a Service Blueprint? Before jumping into activity details please consider a brief overview about the origins of Service Design. “In 1982, the term “service design” was coined by Lynn Shostack. It was proposed that a business should develop a “service blueprint” which details the processes within a company and how each process interacts with other processes.” Lynn Shostack later wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review which evangelized service design methodology and the service blueprint.

What is it? All our ideas about new products, new services, new feature, any changes we can introduce to make things better (growth, revenue, experience, etc.) start as an idea, a hypothesis, an assumption. In traditional approaches one will place the bets based on some form of ROI analysis or investments analysis, making further assumptions in the process. The Design of Experiments is an alternative to this approach, in which we are trying to validate as many of those important ideas/hypothesis/assumptions as early as possible.