{
  "title": "Known gaps",
  "asOf": "2026-09-09",
  "owner": "COO",
  "note": "What the system does not know, written down on purpose. A gap stays on this list until it is answered or until somebody decides it will not be. Age is computed from the date it was opened, not stored, so nothing here can quietly get younger.",
  "impacts": [
    { "id": "high", "label": "High", "meaning": "Leaving this open changes decisions, or lets somebody say something in front of a customer that nobody can stand behind." },
    { "id": "medium", "label": "Medium", "meaning": "Leaving this open costs accuracy and occasionally time." },
    { "id": "low", "label": "Low", "meaning": "Worth knowing. Nothing depends on it this year." }
  ],
  "refusalNote": "A gap marked refuse to guess is one the assistant will not answer around. Asked the question, it says what is not known and who could answer it, and stops there. The alternative is a plausible sentence with nothing behind it, which is the failure this whole system exists to prevent.",
  "gaps": [
    {
      "id": "g01", "area": "Pricing", "openedOn": "2025-04-22", "impact": "high", "refuseToGuess": true,
      "question": "What does a Calder instrument actually transact at, after negotiation.",
      "whyItMatters": "Every competitive pricing conversation rests on their published distributor rate, and two accounts have said plainly that the published rate is a starting point. We may be comparing ourselves against a number nobody pays.",
      "whoCouldAnswer": "Account Manager, through structured win and loss debriefs",
      "whatItWouldTake": "One added question in every competitive debrief, asked the same way, for two quarters. About ten minutes per debrief and somebody to hold the discipline.",
      "impactIfLeftOpen": "Positioning material keeps quoting a price gap that may not exist, and the first customer who knows the real number stops believing the rest of the sheet.",
      "refusalLine": "We do not know what Calder transacts at. We know their published distributor rate and we know two accounts negotiated from it. Anything past that would be a guess."
    },
    {
      "id": "g02", "area": "Market", "openedOn": "2026-03-20", "impact": "medium", "refuseToGuess": true,
      "question": "Is Calder developing a portable instrument.",
      "whyItMatters": "Field and multi-site work is where we win against them today. If a portable Calder unit arrives, that advantage has a date on it.",
      "whoCouldAnswer": "Nobody inside the company. It would need a public announcement or a filing.",
      "whatItWouldTake": "A standing watch on their announcements. Cheap to set up, and it cannot produce an answer before they choose to give one.",
      "impactIfLeftOpen": "A strategy that assumes a permanent advantage in the segment where we are strongest.",
      "refusalLine": "Two people on their stand asked what buyers want from a portable unit. That is an observation at one trade show and it is not evidence of a product."
    },
    {
      "id": "g03", "area": "Pricing", "openedOn": "2026-05-04", "impact": "high", "refuseToGuess": true,
      "question": "Would any meaningful share of our partners take a subscription instead of a purchase.",
      "whyItMatters": "Orrery has removed the capital decision entirely. Whether that matters to our buyers is the difference between a competitive footnote and a business model question.",
      "whoCouldAnswer": "COO, with the Account Manager, after asking partners directly",
      "whatItWouldTake": "A structured question to twenty partner contacts and a fortnight to read the answers. It is small work that nobody has scheduled.",
      "impactIfLeftOpen": "We keep treating a pricing model as a feature difference without knowing whether our own buyers care.",
      "refusalLine": "Nobody has asked our partners this. There is no demand figure to give and inventing one would set a direction on nothing."
    },
    {
      "id": "g04", "area": "Pricing", "openedOn": "2025-11-12", "impact": "high", "refuseToGuess": true,
      "question": "What does Halden actually charge for the bench instrument comparable to the Meridian Pro.",
      "whyItMatters": "The only figure in the file is one account's memory of a quotation from January, second hand, for a configuration we could not confirm. It is marked low confidence and it still gets repeated.",
      "whoCouldAnswer": "Account Manager, if an account in a live evaluation will share a quotation",
      "whatItWouldTake": "One account willing to show a competing quotation, which is a thing that happens two or three times a year and cannot be scheduled.",
      "impactIfLeftOpen": "A number with almost nothing behind it circulates as though it were researched.",
      "refusalLine": "Halden publishes no prices. The one figure we hold is a remembered quotation, eight months old, and it is not something to repeat to a customer."
    },
    {
      "id": "g05", "area": "Pricing", "openedOn": "2026-06-18", "impact": "high", "refuseToGuess": false,
      "question": "What is the five year cost of owning a Meridian Bench, stated in a form a buyer can check line by line.",
      "whyItMatters": "Two competitors are cheaper in year one and more expensive later. That argument only works if our own five year figure is published and defensible, and today it is worked out by hand each time it comes up.",
      "whoCouldAnswer": "Operations Lead, with the COO to approve the assumptions",
      "whatItWouldTake": "A day to build the model from the price master and the calibration schedule, and a decision on which assumptions are house assumptions.",
      "impactIfLeftOpen": "Every seller does the arithmetic differently and no two answers match."
    },
    {
      "id": "g06", "area": "Product", "openedOn": "2026-04-30", "impact": "high", "refuseToGuess": false,
      "question": "Is a measurement record capability worth building.",
      "whyItMatters": "Orrery's platform records every reading and exports it. Nothing in the Meridian line does anything of the sort, and buyers who want a record have nothing from us to want.",
      "whoCouldAnswer": "COO, with Operations",
      "whatItWouldTake": "A scoping exercise against the existing instrument electronics, which is weeks rather than days, and a decision about whether this is a product or a service.",
      "impactIfLeftOpen": "A whole category of buyer is unanswerable and nobody has decided whether that is acceptable."
    },
    {
      "id": "g07", "area": "Operations", "openedOn": "2025-06-02", "impact": "medium", "refuseToGuess": false,
      "question": "How long is our own sales cycle, measured rather than remembered.",
      "whyItMatters": "We describe competitors as slow. We have never measured ourselves, so the comparison is one measured number against one impression.",
      "whoCouldAnswer": "Account Manager",
      "whatItWouldTake": "Two dates recorded on every opportunity, first contact and signature, and two quarters of patience.",
      "impactIfLeftOpen": "A claim about speed that could be wrong in our own disfavour and nobody would know."
    },
    {
      "id": "g08", "area": "Operations", "openedOn": "2025-02-14", "impact": "high", "refuseToGuess": true,
      "question": "Why do we lose the deals we lose.",
      "whyItMatters": "There is no loss reason recorded anywhere. Every statement about why buyers choose somebody else rests on the handful of debriefs that happened to be written down, and those are the deals somebody felt like writing up.",
      "whoCouldAnswer": "Account Manager, with the COO to make it required",
      "whatItWouldTake": "A required field and a rule that a deal cannot be closed without it. The work is small and the discipline is the hard part, which is why it has been open the longest of anything on this list.",
      "impactIfLeftOpen": "Competitive strategy set from four anecdotes, and the anecdotes are the ones that were memorable rather than the ones that were typical.",
      "refusalLine": "We do not record loss reasons. What we have is four written debriefs, which is not a sample and cannot be turned into a percentage."
    },
    {
      "id": "g09", "area": "Product", "openedOn": "2026-07-22", "impact": "medium", "refuseToGuess": false,
      "question": "What is the Field Kit's real duty cycle in field conditions, as opposed to on a bench.",
      "whyItMatters": "The specification figure was measured in a controlled room. The launch note and the one pager both repeat it without saying that.",
      "whoCouldAnswer": "Operations Lead",
      "whatItWouldTake": "A field trial across a season, which is months and needs partner sites willing to run it.",
      "impactIfLeftOpen": "A published figure that is true in the room it was measured in and untested where the product is actually used."
    },
    {
      "id": "g10", "area": "Partner", "openedOn": "2025-09-08", "impact": "medium", "refuseToGuess": false,
      "question": "How many of our partners resell and how many only use.",
      "whyItMatters": "The two need different collateral and different terms, and today they get the same. Nobody knows the split.",
      "whoCouldAnswer": "Account Manager",
      "whatItWouldTake": "One field on the partner record and an afternoon filling it in for the existing network.",
      "impactIfLeftOpen": "Every partner document is written for an average partner who may not exist."
    },
    {
      "id": "g11", "area": "Service", "openedOn": "2026-02-03", "impact": "high", "refuseToGuess": false,
      "question": "What is our calibration turnaround in practice, measured, rather than what the operations table says.",
      "whyItMatters": "Three business days is printed on a price sheet, a service levels sheet, a proposal and a guide. It is the figure a partner will hold us to and it has never been checked against what actually happened.",
      "whoCouldAnswer": "Operations Lead",
      "whatItWouldTake": "Two dates per calibration job, in and out, and one quarter of records. The dates are already written on the paperwork and nobody adds them up.",
      "impactIfLeftOpen": "The company publishes a commitment it has not verified it meets, which is a smaller version of the failure that stopped a delivery this month."
    },
    {
      "id": "g12", "area": "Pricing", "openedOn": "2025-12-01", "impact": "high", "refuseToGuess": false,
      "question": "Is Atlas Care Plus profitable at 149 a month.",
      "whyItMatters": "The plan is quoted in four documents and priced from the price master. Nobody has put the delivery cost against it.",
      "whoCouldAnswer": "COO",
      "whatItWouldTake": "The service hours actually spent on plan customers over two quarters, set against the plan revenue. The hours are recorded and have never been totalled.",
      "impactIfLeftOpen": "A plan is being sold harder every quarter with no idea whether volume helps or hurts."
    },
    {
      "id": "g13", "area": "Service", "openedOn": "2026-09-04", "impact": "high", "refuseToGuess": false,
      "question": "What would a four hour response commitment cost to staff, and is it a commitment we want to make.",
      "whyItMatters": "A draft service levels sheet stated one, it was caught before delivery because no source supported it, and the useful part is that somebody clearly thought it was the right promise. Nobody has ever decided whether it is.",
      "whoCouldAnswer": "COO, with the Operations Lead on staffing",
      "whatItWouldTake": "A staffing model against current out of hours request volume. The volume is not recorded either, so this gap sits behind another one.",
      "impactIfLeftOpen": "The same sentence gets written again by somebody else, and the next time the tier that catches it might not be the tier that runs."
    },
    {
      "id": "g14", "area": "Market", "openedOn": "2025-03-05", "impact": "medium", "refuseToGuess": true,
      "question": "How large is the market we are actually in.",
      "whyItMatters": "Every plan that starts with a share figure starts with a number nobody in this company has sourced.",
      "whoCouldAnswer": "Nobody internally. It would take a bought study or a built one.",
      "whatItWouldTake": "A commissioned study, which is real money, or a bottom up build from partner counts that would take weeks and still be an estimate.",
      "impactIfLeftOpen": "Planning conversations keep reaching for a denominator that does not exist.",
      "refusalLine": "We have no sourced market size. Any figure you have seen in a deck came from somewhere nobody can name, which is the reason this gap is open."
    },
    {
      "id": "g15", "area": "Product", "openedOn": "2026-01-15", "impact": "medium", "refuseToGuess": false,
      "question": "Is the twelve month calibration interval right, or is it conservative.",
      "whyItMatters": "A competitor publishes six months on a comparable instrument. We say twelve. One of those is wrong for the buyer and we have not shown our working.",
      "whoCouldAnswer": "Operations Lead",
      "whatItWouldTake": "Drift data from returned instruments, which exists in the calibration records and has never been analysed.",
      "impactIfLeftOpen": "A genuine advantage that we cannot defend if anybody asks how we know."
    },
    {
      "id": "g16", "area": "Product", "openedOn": "2025-05-19", "impact": "medium", "refuseToGuess": false,
      "question": "What share of instruments are still in service after five years.",
      "whyItMatters": "Every cost of ownership argument assumes a life. Nobody has measured one.",
      "whoCouldAnswer": "Operations Lead",
      "whatItWouldTake": "Serial number records matched against service history, which needs the two systems reconciled first.",
      "impactIfLeftOpen": "The five year comparison against a subscription rests on an assumed life that nobody has checked."
    },
    {
      "id": "g17", "area": "Data", "openedOn": "2026-06-01", "impact": "low", "refuseToGuess": false,
      "question": "Which of our documents do partners actually open.",
      "whyItMatters": "The system produces guides, sheets and notes at a steady rate and has no idea which of them are read.",
      "whoCouldAnswer": "Marketing Lead",
      "whatItWouldTake": "Delivery level records on the documents that go out through a trackable route. Some go by hand and would never be counted.",
      "impactIfLeftOpen": "Effort is spread evenly across documents that are not read evenly."
    },
    {
      "id": "g18", "area": "Operations", "openedOn": "2026-09-04", "impact": "high", "refuseToGuess": false,
      "question": "Which signed agreements have appendices that the source index has never pulled.",
      "whyItMatters": "A verifier reported a claim as unsourced and was wrong. The clause was in an appendix that the index recorded as an attachment and never read. If one agreement is split like that, others will be.",
      "whoCouldAnswer": "Operations Lead",
      "whatItWouldTake": "A pass over every indexed agreement checking attachment counts against the file store. A day, and it can be scripted.",
      "impactIfLeftOpen": "Verifiers keep reading half a document and reporting confidently on what they found."
    },
    {
      "id": "g19", "area": "Market", "openedOn": "2026-05-20", "impact": "medium", "refuseToGuess": false,
      "question": "What does it cost a site to leave Orrery.",
      "whyItMatters": "If the measurement record stays with them, the switching cost is the whole argument and we have never looked at their terms for it.",
      "whoCouldAnswer": "Marketing Lead",
      "whatItWouldTake": "A careful read of their published terms, which are public. This one is genuinely small and has simply not been done.",
      "impactIfLeftOpen": "A competitive conversation is missing the point that would matter most to a buyer already on their platform."
    },
    {
      "id": "g20", "area": "Product", "openedOn": "2026-03-11", "impact": "medium", "refuseToGuess": false,
      "question": "Is our twenty four month warranty competitive or generous.",
      "whyItMatters": "One competitor publishes twelve. Three others are not compared, and the claim that ours is the better term rests on one comparison.",
      "whoCouldAnswer": "Operations Lead",
      "whatItWouldTake": "Reading four published warranty documents and building one table. An afternoon.",
      "impactIfLeftOpen": "A comparative claim built on a sample of one."
    },
    {
      "id": "g21", "area": "Pricing", "openedOn": "2025-11-14", "impact": "medium", "refuseToGuess": false,
      "question": "What does an on-site training day cost us to deliver.",
      "whyItMatters": "It is priced at 650 in the catalog and quoted in proposals. The catalog is also the source that is furthest past its review date.",
      "whoCouldAnswer": "Customer Success Lead, with the COO",
      "whatItWouldTake": "Travel and time records for the days delivered this year, which exist as expenses and have never been grouped.",
      "impactIfLeftOpen": "A line item is sold at a price nobody has tested against its cost, out of a catalog nobody has reviewed."
    },
    {
      "id": "g22", "area": "Market", "openedOn": "2026-08-01", "impact": "low", "refuseToGuess": false,
      "question": "Is anybody in the category winning on freight and delivery rather than on product.",
      "whyItMatters": "One competitor's advantage in two accounts was distributor stock, which is a logistics advantage described as a product one.",
      "whoCouldAnswer": "Operations Lead",
      "whatItWouldTake": "A question added to the same competitive debrief that gap one needs, so it costs nothing extra once that exists.",
      "impactIfLeftOpen": "We may be losing to a warehouse and calling it a product gap."
    },
    {
      "id": "g23", "area": "Market", "openedOn": "2025-08-27", "impact": "high", "refuseToGuess": true,
      "question": "In a multi-site network, who actually decides.",
      "whyItMatters": "Documents are written for a signatory, a procurement reader and an operator, and the audience matrix assigns them by title. Nobody has confirmed that the titles match the decision.",
      "whoCouldAnswer": "Account Manager, by asking in live evaluations",
      "whatItWouldTake": "One question asked consistently across a dozen evaluations. It is not hard and it has never been assigned to anybody.",
      "impactIfLeftOpen": "Every audience decision in the document system rests on an assumption, including which documents get written at all.",
      "refusalLine": "We have an audience matrix and no evidence behind it. Asked who decides, the honest answer is that we assign by title and have never checked."
    },
    {
      "id": "g24", "area": "Product", "openedOn": "2026-04-14", "impact": "high", "refuseToGuess": false,
      "question": "What is our instrument failure rate, by family, in the first two years.",
      "whyItMatters": "Warranty terms, service plan pricing and the loan instrument policy all rest on it, and all three were set without it.",
      "whoCouldAnswer": "Operations Lead",
      "whatItWouldTake": "Warranty claims matched to units shipped, by family. Both sets of records exist and have never been joined.",
      "impactIfLeftOpen": "Three commercial decisions rest on an unmeasured rate, and one of them is a price."
    },
    {
      "id": "g25", "area": "Operations", "openedOn": "2026-09-04", "impact": "medium", "refuseToGuess": false,
      "question": "Is the partner column of the price master applied consistently by every document that quotes a price.",
      "whyItMatters": "Two documents in one batch quoted the same instrument at two different real prices, one list and one partner, and neither said which. The pair read as a contradiction to the reader who received both.",
      "whoCouldAnswer": "Operations Lead",
      "whatItWouldTake": "A rule that every published price names its column, and a pass over the documents already out. The rule is written and the pass is not done.",
      "impactIfLeftOpen": "Partners keep receiving two true numbers that look like a mistake."
    }
  ]
}