There is a particular kind of meeting that most product teams will recognise immediately. Someone has an idea, It’s a good idea, or at least it feels like one. There’s energy in the room, a few slides get made, a name gets floated, someone gooks a workshop. Then, slowly, the idea gets build. Not because anyone pressure-tested it, but because there was enough momentum of early enthusiasm that is very hard to stop once it gets started.
Six months later, the thing exists. And everyone is quietly pretending it was always going to be this hard to get traction.
I’ve been in enough of those meetings to know exactly how they happen. The problem isn’t that people aren’t smart. It’s that early-stage ideas are fragile, and the social dynamics of most organisations make it genuinely difficult to challenge them honestly before significant resource has been committed. Nobody wants to be the person who killed the idea. So the questions that should be asked in week one get deferred to the post-mortem.
The irony is that the questions themselves aren’t complicated. They’re variations on five things:
- Is the problem actually real, and is it worth solving?
- Do we know precisely who suffers from this problem, and have we talked to them?
- How will we know if this worked?
- What’s the assumption that, if wrong, ends this?
- Why this, why now, why us?
Those five questions are the difference between an initiative that deserves a team’s time and one that deserves a respectful burial at the proposal stage. The difficulty isn’t identifying them. It’s being honest enough — and structured enough — to ask them before the energy of the room makes it socially awkward to do so.
The best product leaders I’ve encountered have internalised this as a reflex. Before they get excited about a solution, they get rigorous about the problem. They build the habit of stress-testing their own thinking — and they create environments where doing that to other people’s thinking is considered a sign of respect, not a personal attack.
That’s a cultural shift that takes years. But the underlying practice can be learned faster.
The way I think about it: every initiative should be able to answer a simple challenge before it earns any resource. Not a business case — those come later, and they can be made to say anything. A honest reckoning with whether the foundations are solid.
In learning design, we’d call this checking your assumptions before you build. In product, it’s closer to what Amazon used to call working backwards — starting from the outcome and asking whether you’ve actually established that the outcome matters, to whom, and how you’d measure it.
Both disciplines are pointing at the same thing. The people who build well tend to be the ones who ask the hardest questions earliest.
That instinct is what I’ve tried to encode in the tool below.
It’s a CPO-level pressure-tester — designed for the moment before you commit. You describe an initiative: a product idea, a strategic bet, a feature, a new offering. It challenges it across five dimensions and returns an honest verdict: GO, REFINE, or KILL. Not to make the decision for you. But to surface what you might be avoiding.
The most useful output isn’t the score. It’s the last question — the one the tool calls “the question you must answer first.” That’s the assumption that, if you can’t answer it, means everything else is premature.
I built it for myself. But I think it’s useful for anyone who builds things in education — learning designers, programme leads, product managers, institutional strategy teams. Anywhere that good ideas regularly get built without enough scrutiny first.
Use it before the workshop. Use it before the slide deck. Use it before the meeting where the momentum starts.
Paste in your initiative. It takes about thirty seconds.
Learning by Design is a publication about product thinking for the future of education. If someone forwarded this to you, you can subscribe at megknighted.substack.com.
Meg Knight 
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