Graham McNicoll

I have sat in spec reviews where the Jira tickets were written, the designs were finished, the user flows were mapped end to end, and the full spec sheet described a product from beginning to end. Nobody in the room had asked the only question that mattered: what signal do we have that anyone actually wants this? That question is uncomfortable because the honest answer is usually none. The idea sounded good in a brainstorm and someone senior liked it. The team started building. A painted door test answers it in a day or two. Put a button on a page and see if people click on it. You can build in minutes what might take months and still fail. If enough people click, you have a real signal worth building toward. If they do not, you just learned something in two days that your spec process would have taken two months to discover. I have done both. I have shipped features that took months and moved nothing. I have run painted door tests in a day that reshaped the entire roadmap. The second version is faster and far less painful for everyone involved. Industry-wide, only 20 to 30% of features move the metric they were built to move. Most teams find that out at launch. They could have found it out in a day, for near-zero cost, and pointed the team toward something with real signal behind it. That is what shrinking the loop means in practice. Turn every product idea into a falsifiable hypothesis. Build the smallest thing that can validate or invalidate it. Go from there. What is on your roadmap right now that could be validated with a painted door before anyone writes a line of production code?

Only one snapshot so far — the engagement-over-time curve appears once the daily scrape has captured this post at least twice.