Main idea

When a decision turns out badly, the spontaneous diagnosis is a shortage: we should have had more data, more interviews, more measurements.

The defect is often elsewhere. The information was available, but it was never tested against itself: one important piece of customer feedback contradicted another, a technical constraint changed the scope of the problem, a commercial opportunity pushed one way and the product reality the other, an appealing assumption rested on thin evidence.

What was missing wasn't the material, it was the test — the time to put the signals face to face before drawing a decision from them.

Why it matters

The diagnosis changes the remedy. If the problem is volume, you collect more — and make things worse, since you are adding untested signals to untested signals.

It also gives a criterion for knowing when a decision is ready: not when you have everything, but when the contradictions among what you have been seen and settled.

Nuances and limits

Real shortages of information exist, and confusing them with a failure to test leads to deciding on nothing while believing you have confronted.

And the testing has an end: past that, confronting becomes a way of deferring.

Open questions

• How do you recognize, before the decision, that you are facing a real shortage rather than insufficient testing?