Answerable to Reality

Preface: The Best Slide in the Room

1. What level this operates at
2. What Value Control is
3. An intellectual debt

Part I — What Is Actually There

1. What Are You Actually Developing?

1. Start from the situation that exists
2. Most of what is called product development is production
3. So what is product development?
4. A useful comparison
5. Rational without pretending to know everything
6. Design towards the requirement

2. Value Is Not a Slogan

1. Start in the stakeholder’s world
2. What it does, and how good it is
3. Requirements exist at several levels
4. There is rarely one outcome
5. Below the methods
6. Goals and boundaries
7. Sufficient, not perfect
8. The model is already doing management work

3. Keep the Means as Means

1. Requirement and design are different things
2. The reason underneath the feature
3. Search before you compare
4. Do not spend design freedom casually
5. Novel work makes the model provisional, not useless
6. A requirement can also be a means
7. The arrows are bets
8. Real constraints still constrain

4. Seven Confusions

1. What moves, and what does not

Part II — Put It Into the Decision

5. Make “Better” Explicit

1. Quantification comes before measurement
2. A scale forces disagreement into the open
3. Where do the levels come from?
4. “These numbers are made up”
5. Goodhart still applies
6. Current, tolerable, goal, boundary
7. Conditions matter
8. Explicit value becomes divisible
9. The quality of the requirement is not a documentation problem
10. Only the critical ones

6. One Design, Many Consequences

1. One effect is never the whole case
2. Value first, then acceptable cost
3. What cannot be traded away
4. Compare the relevant pattern
5. What follows puts that on one page.

7. Why Not Just Try It?

1. How much reasoning is the right amount

8. One Page, Eight Hundred Thousand

1. What we are trying to improve
2. The resources that constrain this decision
3. Do we have enough design?
4. The table
5. One design is rarely the answer
6. The next commitment

9. Let Reality Answer

1. Three forecasts “hit”, and that proves less than it looks
2. Different evidence horizons
3. Evidence is not yet learning
4. Let the evidence reach the right part of the theory
5. Let the model lose too
6. Two things narrowing in opposite directions
7. Exposure before evidence
8. Approval is a ceiling
9. Stop when enough is enough

10. What You Can Actually Know

1. What the numbers said
2. What the evidence could do
3. What management did with it
4. Six things that follow

Part III — Make It Survive the Organisation

11. The Organisation That Can Be Wrong

1. The same pilot, reported two ways
2. Authority is real, and so is causal reach
3. When the premise breaks, the decision returns
4. How this gets hollowed out
5. Start with one real decision
6. The longer task

Afterword — Answerable to Reality

Glossary

Notes and Sources

About the Author