Five Risks Assessment Template

Value risk asks whether customers will actually choose to use this, independent of whether it can be built. Usability risk asks whether users can figure out how to use it once it exists. Feasibility risk asks whether engineering can build it with the available time, skills, and technology. Business viability risk asks whether the rest of the business, legal, finance, sales, marketing, and brand, can actually support it. Ethical risk, the fifth category, asks who could be harmed by this working exactly as designed, a question the other four do not ask directly.

An example for an AI powered resume screening feature: value risk, will recruiters trust an AI ranking enough to change how they screen candidates. Usability risk, can a recruiter understand why a candidate was ranked where they were. Feasibility risk, can the model be trained on enough labeled data to rank reliably. Business viability risk, does this expose the company to discrimination liability. Ethical risk, could the model encode and scale existing hiring bias under the appearance of objectivity, which for this specific feature is arguably the risk most likely to matter most.

Use this template early in discovery, before committing to a solution direction, specifically for ideas that feel technically exciting enough that the team might rush past value or ethical risk to get to building. It pairs naturally with an assumption mapping template: this assessment identifies which risk category matters most for a given idea, and assumption mapping breaks that category down into specific testable beliefs.

Fill in each risk category with a specific, answerable question rather than a generic checkbox, and force a genuine answer for all five even when one feels obviously fine; the categories a team assumes are fine are usually the ones that turn out not to be. Rank the five by which one is most likely to kill the idea for this specific product, since that ranking, not the presence of the risk itself, is what should determine what gets tested first.

The most common mistake is skipping the ethical risk category entirely, treating it as a legal or compliance concern rather than a product design one, and discovering the harm only after real users are affected. A second common mistake is treating feasibility as the default first risk to check just because it is the most familiar territory for a technical team, when value risk is statistically the risk most likely to kill a new product idea.

Builders Camp's Product Strategy bootcamp includes this risk framework as part of making strategic choices a team can defend, alongside the value curve and four actions framework templates used for competitive positioning. The template lives in the Builders Camp templates library, included in every Membership alongside the rest of the catalog.