Hypothesis

A hypothesis is a testable claim about the world. Not a wish, not a vision — a proposition that can be disproved by evidence. "If we cut price 10%, volume will rise at least 15%." "Users abandon the funnel at step 3 because of load time." "This market will reach $500M in five years." Each is falsifiable. Run the experiment, measure the outcome, and you either reject the hypothesis or fail to reject it. The power of the frame is that it forces clarity. Vague goals ("we want to grow") don't tell you what to measure. A hypothesis does. It also protects you from confirmation bias: the point is to test, not to prove. You look for evidence that would kill the hypothesis. If you don't find it, the hypothesis survives for now.

In strategy and product, the discipline is to state the hypothesis before you act. What do we believe? What would have to be true for this bet to pay off? What would disprove it? Teams that skip this step optimise in the dark. They ship features and hope. Hypothesis-driven teams ship to learn. The difference is whether the decision is framed as "let's try this" or "we believe X; we'll know we're wrong if Y." The second frame produces better experiments and faster learning. It also forces prioritisation: you can't test twenty hypotheses at once. You pick the one that would change the decision most if it were wrong.