A test just wrapped. The numbers are in front of the team, someone opens with “well, this basically confirms what we thought,” and within ten minutes the meeting has quietly turned into a defense of the idea everyone liked before the test even started. Nobody voted for that outcome. It just happened — because the human brain is built to skip the hard part of deciding and go straight to the comfortable part of agreeing.
Every founder eventually hits the same wall: too many signals, too little certainty, and a backlog full of ideas that all sound plausible. The instinct is to ask “what should we build next?” But there’s a sharper question hiding underneath it — one that Columbia Business School strategist Rita McGrath puts to CEOs before they touch a roadmap at all: what is this company actually centered on?
You ran the interviews. You shipped the rough prototype. You watched a handful of people poke at the thing you’ve been thinking about for months. And now you’re staring at a pile of notes that feels less like an answer and more like a Rorschach test. A few people loved it. One was lukewarm. Two never came back. So — is the idea good?
