feat(skills): add outcome hypothesis capability for measurable business outcomes

[zeier]

Problem

HVE Core provides strong Design Thinking capabilities for understanding people, their needs, and the experiences that should improve. That user-centric perspective is essential, but teams also need a complementary way to articulate the measurable business outcomes an initiative is expected to produce.

Without an explicit outcome hypothesis, initiatives can remain framed around delivering an MVP, proof of concept, feature, or technical artifact. This makes it difficult to align stakeholders on the expected business result, determine whether evidence is strong enough to invest, or continuously optimize delivery toward measurable value.

Proposed capability

Add an outcome-hypothesis skill that creates or assesses an evidence-grounded, falsifiable prediction of:

• what measurable business result will change;
• who benefits from that change;
• the target and timeframe;
• which leading and lagging indicators prove or disprove the prediction;
• how the result will be measured and owned;
• which assumptions, risks, and evidence gaps remain.

The skill should score readiness before drafting, avoid inventing missing evidence, distinguish provisional hypotheses from investable ones, and redirect deliverable-led framing toward beneficiary and business outcomes.

Relationship to Design Thinking

The capability complements rather than replaces Design Thinking:

• Design Thinking provides a user-centric approach for understanding people, problems, journeys, and desirable solutions.
• Outcome hypotheses add the perspective of measurable business outcomes by articulating those outcomes, making them measurable, and enabling continuous optimization toward measurable business results.

Together they connect human desirability with an explicit, testable value prediction: teams can understand the user need, state the business result expected from addressing it, and use evidence to adapt the intervention over time.

Expected value

• Shift conversations from artifact delivery to measurable beneficiary and business results.
• Create shared alignment on targets, timeframes, indicators, and falsification criteria.
• Surface missing baselines, ownership, and evidence before investment decisions.
• Enable continuous optimization against leading and lagging indicators.
• Provide an outcome-led starting point before BRD or PRD authoring.

Acceptance criteria

• The skill is directly invocable and semantically discoverable from both explicit and indirect outcome-framing requests.
• It supports Ready, Provisional, and Investigate routes based on an evidence scorecard.
• It produces measurable targets, an end-to-end outcome chain, assumptions, falsification criteria, and explicit evidence gaps.
• It does not fabricate baselines, targets, owners, sources, stakeholders, or dates.
• It is included in the project-planning and aggregate HVE Core distributions with generated reference documentation.