Independent judgement for decision safety.
Independent judgement for decision safety.
Trust & Fit
This is an independent assessment of whether the product metrics and behavioural signals you already rely on can safely support the decisions being made.
This page sets out when that kind of judgement helps, when it doesn't, and what must be true for the result to be defensible under scrutiny.
Fit shows up when a decision needs to be defended and the metric story only holds with insider context. This page is about whether an independent assessment can be conducted responsibly and produce a judgement that holds up when questioned.
If the work cannot remain assessment-only, tool-agnostic, and independent of implementation, it stops being safe.
In the following conditions, a judgement would have to borrow too much meaning from assumptions or untested intent. The safest outcome is not to proceed under the banner of assessment.
- The evidence needed to judge decision safety doesn’t exist yet, so the work would require new implementation before it could be assessed.
- Success is defined as uplift (KPI improvement, growth outcomes, experimentation throughput), so the work would be evaluated on performance rather than defensibility.
- The primary need is reporting output (dashboards, tool configuration, tracking plans) rather than judgement under scrutiny.
- There is no decision owner, or accountability is expected to transfer to the assessment.
- The intent is reassurance (‘tell us our metrics are fine’) rather than examination (‘help us understand what these signals can support’).
These are scope constraints required to protect judgement quality and decision safety.
This is typically useful when the organisation already has analytics in place, but the signals no longer feel stable enough to carry decision weight.
- A metric is repeatedly questioned in leadership reviews, but no one can explain it without insider context.
- Two teams use the same metric name, but mean different things when making decisions.
- A product change, consent change, or platform shift altered what is observable without creating a visible ‘break’.
- Dashboards show activity, but intent is unclear — and decisions are being made anyway.
- A migration or schema change created a “like-for-like” continuity story that does not withstand scrutiny.
- Confidence has eroded quietly: the charts still update, but the conclusions feel less defensible over time.
In these situations, the work is a second opinion on meaning and defensibility — not a request for better tracking.
An assessment can only be defensible when the decision context is real, the signals exist, and independence can be maintained.
- There is an identifiable decision owner who will hold the decision and its consequences.
- Some meaningful telemetry or product metrics already exist (even if they are messy).
- The goal is examination, not confirmation.
- Access can be provided to the minimum evidence required to form judgement (definitions, dashboards as artefacts, change context).
- The assessment can remain bounded and assessment-only, without drifting into implementation ownership.
The work is time- and scope-bounded. It produces an assessment artefact that can be forwarded internally without translation.
- A clear judgement on decision safety for specific signals in the decision context provided.
- Named assumptions and interpretive dependencies (identity, session meaning, consent boundaries, coverage limits).
- Plausible failure modes and where meaning is ambiguous or drifting.
- Clarification of what the current metrics can support — and what they cannot.
- Descriptive, defensible explanations — not implementation guidance or best practices.
An engagement may be paused or concluded if it can no longer be conducted responsibly.
- Required access cannot be provided to support judgement.
- Scope expands beyond assessment into delivery, optimisation, or ownership of execution.
- Independence cannot be maintained due to organisational or political constraints.
- The work would create false reassurance rather than defensible clarity.
Stopping is treated as a quality safeguard.
Uncertainty usually clears once the request is tied to a specific decision risk and the few signals currently carrying weight. If that link is real, the work is usually viable.
If it does not hold yet, the Methods and Services pages clarify what an assessment can and cannot do.