Assumption Debt

You've heard of technical debt. It's the cost of choosing what works now over what will hold up later.

Most companies carry some amount of technical debt around with them. When it tips from "reasonable tradeoffs" to something more serious, that's when it starts to get painful.

The same is true of assumption debt.

What is that? It's the price you pay each time you make an assumption that's not based on real data.

You assume users will discover the new feature on their own. They never find it.

You assume the problem is pricing. It's onboarding.

You assume everyone thinks about your product the way you do. They don't.

Assumption debt accumulates the same way technical debt does—one reasonable decision at a time.

Paying it down doesn't require a big initiative. A short conversation, a prototype, a quick test. Each one replaces a guess with something real.

And like technical debt, the goal isn't zero. It's knowing what you owe.