From pains to three joint projects

The top box is the answer to door 1, and it is written in her words, not yours. At Harbourline it reads: expired-stock write-off from 2.1 percent of cost of goods to 1.5, and no chronic-medication stock-outs in the six Malaysian outlets. Two things she is measured on, two things she can see. A dashboard is not on it, and neither is a data warehouse, because she never said either was the point.

Test the top box by turning the tree over. If what sits at the top is "build a dashboard", the tree is upside down: a solution is pretending to be an outcome, and every branch under it will be a feature of the dashboard rather than a pain of hers. That is the tree that produces the vendor pilot nobody opened. An outcome box you can check a solution against reads like a fact about the shop in six months, and it has a number in it if she gave you one.

Keeping her words is not politeness. The sentence "write-off to 1.5 percent" is the one the regional GM and the board already recognise, so a project that points at it is a project she can defend upward without translating. The moment you rewrite it as "improve inventory visibility", it is your project again.

The second row is a transcript, not a brainstorm. Each box is a pain she voiced behind doors 2, 3 and 4: Priya's six hours every Monday; three versions of the stock spreadsheet in circulation; product codes that differ between the Singapore and Malaysia outlets; supplier orders over WhatsApp with no order table anywhere; the Monday number that changes nothing, because when it looks bad they phone the outlet; area managers on their phones in the outlets, not at a laptop. Six boxes, six things she said.

The discipline is to write nothing in this row she did not say. "No single source of truth" is your diagnosis; "three spreadsheets in circulation" is her pain. The first is a solution wearing a problem's clothes, and it will pull a warehouse in behind it. Torres's rule, as reported, is that opportunities are framed from the customer's side, and the reason is practical: a pain in her words is one she will recognise on the page and fight for, and a diagnosis in yours is one she will nod at and forget.

Which opportunity is strongest is the first real judgement on the page, and it is a judgement about the outcome, not about the data. The stock spreadsheet earns the terracotta edge because both halves of her outcome, write-off and stock-outs, are decided by whether the Friday stock count is right, and today there are three of them.

Solutions are the only layer you invent, and the rule is at least two per opportunity you take seriously. Under the stock spreadsheet: one spreadsheet, typed once, with a Friday check; a stock count entered through a form on the phone; a stock module from the POS vendor once the Q1 budget opens. Three shapes, from cheapest to dearest. The point of writing three is not to choose the best on the spot. It is to stop the first one you thought of from becoming the plan because it was alone on the page.

Torres's fourth layer, assumption tests, is the one analysts skip and should not: under each solution, the thing that must be true for it to work, and the cheapest way to find out. Under "one spreadsheet, typed once" the assumption is that outlet managers will type into a shared file on Friday if it is the only one; the test is to ask the four pilot outlets to do it for two weeks. The Product Thinking course teaches the tree as a discipline, with the interviewing cadence around it; here it is borrowed for one job, ordering what she already told you.

Pruning has one rule: one candidate under each of the three strongest opportunities, never three solutions to one. Three ways to fix the stock spreadsheet is a menu, and a menu makes her choose a build. Three projects under three different pains is a portfolio, and a portfolio lets her choose a problem, which is the choice she is qualified to make.

Each candidate is written the same way, in four lines: what it is, in words from her tree; the first step, something that can start this week; who does it, a named person on her side and on yours; and what it needs, which at Harbourline is nothing until Q1 for two of the three. "One product master for both countries, owner named" is a candidate. "Improve data quality" is a wish. The test is whether Priya could read the four lines and know what she is doing on Monday.

Notice what the prune did to the request. "A dashboard" is not one of the three. The phone list is the nearest thing to it, and it is candidate 3 not candidate 1, because its confidence score is honest about the fact that a suggested reorder built on three disagreeing stock counts is a suggested guess.

Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown's ICE score, reported here from Hacking Growth, rates each candidate on impact, confidence and ease, each from 1 to 10. How the three are combined is contested: some teams multiply, some average, and the book's own practice is described differently across the summaries that quote it. So the honest move is not to pick the right rule. It is to write down which one you used, above the grid, before you fill in a digit. The two rules can disagree: a candidate scored 9, 9 and 2 averages 6.7 and multiplies to 162; one scored 6, 6 and 6 averages 6.0 and multiplies to 216. Multiplying punishes a weak leg; averaging forgives it. Neither is wrong. An unwritten rule is.

The digits are yours, and that is the point rather than a weakness. A grid with the rule above it is a page she can argue with: "why is confidence 6 on the phone list?" is a conversation about the shop, and it usually ends with a better digit. A ranking with no rule and no digits is a verdict, and a verdict she did not make is one she will not defend to the board.

Google's machine learning problem-framing course, read at source, gives one line that belongs on every prioritisation grid: verify that the current non-ML solution is optimized before you build anything cleverer. The course is about models, and the line is about analytics too. At Harbourline the suggested reorder is the clever thing, and the spreadsheet that feeds it is the current solution, and it is not optimized; it exists in three versions. Fix the spreadsheet first and the reorder gets a confidence score above 6. Build the reorder first and it will be right about a stock count that is wrong.

This is also why the winner on the grid needs no budget. The cheapest candidate that moves her outcome is nearly always a fix to the current way, because the current way was never designed, it accreted. The Decision Intelligence course owns the wider discipline of choosing between options under uncertainty; the grid here is a single page of it.

A pilot is the winning candidate with four things pinned to it: a scope, a partner, a test and a date. All four came out of doors 5 and 6, so none of them is yours to invent. Scope: four outlets, because she said she would sponsor four and never 38 at once. Partner: Priya, two hours a week. Test: the area managers stop phoning her on Monday afternoon. Date: one slide for the board in six weeks.

Four outlets beat 38 for a reason she can feel and you can measure. In four outlets the single spreadsheet is a conversation with four managers; across 38 it is a policy, and policies are the thing the previous pilot was. A quiet phone beats a login count because the login count measures the tool and the quiet phone measures the outcome; a dashboard opened twice and a dashboard opened two hundred times can both leave the stock-outs exactly where they were. Session 1's door 1 line applies: a tool is checked against an outcome, never the other way round.

The constraint shapes the first step more than the ambition does. No budget until Q1 means the product-code list is a shared sheet Priya and you agree in week 1, and the stock spreadsheet is the existing file with two versions retired, not a new system. When the SGD 15,000 opens in Q1, the pilot has produced the one thing a budget conversation needs: a fact from four outlets about what happened to the Friday count.

Priya is not a resource on the plan. She is the reason the work survives you. She builds the Monday report today, six hours every Monday, so she knows every column and every fudge in it; she asked for a course, so she wants the two hours to be a lesson and not a hand-over; and she is on leave for two weeks in November, which is the first test of whether the single spreadsheet runs without her. A pilot with no named partner on her side has a shelf life of one analyst.

Torres's weekly contact with the people you are building for, reported here, is the cadence for the analyst too: the two hours are the same two hours every week, in the calendar, with the four outlet managers on a call for the first fifteen minutes of it. Rob Fitzpatrick's test from door 6, whether the other side gave up something, is met the moment Priya's Tuesday afternoon is blocked. Everything after that is the two of you finding out what the Friday count is actually like, which is the fact the board slide will be built on.