Your agents already know the job.

Escalating an overdue invoice before establishing why it is unpaid. Most late payment is a broken process — wrong PO, wrong entity, an invoice that never reached the payer — and a demand letter to a customer whose finance team never received the invoice costs the relationship and does not collect.

Answering a question from a dataset without checking whether it is complete for the window asked about. A partially loaded table returns a number rather than an error, and the number is confidently wrong in the direction that looks like a decline.

Diagnosing motivation from a number. A rep behind on quota has a stage where deals stop, and the stage is findable; "needs to be hungrier" is a verdict that cannot be acted on and cannot be wrong.

Scaling spend on a platform-reported ROAS, which is the platform marking its own homework. The store is the source of truth for money and the two numbers routinely disagree by more than the decision margin.

Adding a free tier to a product that needs a person to explain it, which fills the funnel with users who never reach value and produces a support load with no revenue attached.

Splitting accounts evenly by count. Equal account numbers produce wildly unequal opportunity, so the outcome is read as a performance difference between people when it was a design difference between patches.

Designing a loop as a sequence of conversations with senior people. An unstructured interview measures rapport and measures it repeatedly — five of them is one weak signal sampled five times, not five signals.

Producing a policy that describes an ideal company rather than this one. A policy that does not match what the product actually does is worse than none: it is a written, dated commitment to something we are visibly not doing.

Ranking vendors by price and recommending the expensive ones be cut. The recoverable money is in low-value spend that renews silently — seats nobody uses, tools replaced by another tool, an annual plan that auto-renewed past its usefulness — and the expensive line is usually the load-bearing one.

Adding a product tour to a first-run experience whose real blocker was that the user had no data to work with. A tour explains an empty screen; it does not fill it.

Picking the more plausible of two conflicting numbers and reporting it. Two systems disagreeing almost never means one is broken — it means they are answering slightly different questions, and choosing between them discards the actual finding.

An onboarding plan made of reading and introductions, with no owned outcome — so nobody can tell whether it worked and the new person cannot either.

A prep doc assembled from the company website and a generic discovery framework, which produces questions the prospect has already answered twice and burns the first ten minutes of the call.

A board pack that reports and does not ask. The board is an asset that goes unused, and the hard question gets asked in the room instead of before it.

Producing a salary number from the model's own sense of the market. Compensation data is local, level-specific and dated; a confident figure with no named source is the single most damaging invented number in this domain, because somebody will offer it.

Producing a quote whose price came from nowhere and whose scope is a paragraph. An unbounded scope with a firm number is the origin of most delivery disputes, and the discount given to close it is permanent because the next renewal starts from it.

Gating the feature that demonstrates the value, so the free user never experiences the reason to pay and the upgrade prompt argues with somebody who has no evidence.

Reading a company-wide average as a trend. An aggregate mixes cohorts of different ages and different sizes, so a genuine improvement in new-customer retention can leave the headline number flat — or a growing company can show improving averages while every individual cohort gets worse.

Reporting total pipeline value as the story. The total is dominated by deals nobody has touched in a month, and it goes up when reps stop closing.

Starting the renewal conversation inside the notice window, when the only remaining lever is a discount.

Treating an account as healthy because nobody has complained. Silence from a single-threaded account is the strongest churn signal there is, and an account plan written the month before renewal is a rescue.

A weekly review whose metric set changes each week, so nothing can be compared and a metric that stops appearing is never noticed.

A public statement that commits the company to something nobody internally agreed, or an incident note whose hedging reads as a cover-up. Both are unretractable and both come from drafting before the facts and the approver were settled.

Scoring a candidate on impressions the CV produced — pedigree, company names, a tidy career line — rather than on evidence against a written bar. The impression is the part that carries bias and the part that predicts least.

Writing a script as prose to be read aloud. Written sentences are longer and more subordinate than spoken ones, so a script that reads well is delivered stiffly and the viewer leaves in the first seconds — before anything the script was about.

A priority list of nine items, which is a list of nine things that will each be done a ninth.

Building the dashboard that was asked for, as a set of metrics. A dashboard with no decision attached is looked at twice and then never again, and its existence is used as evidence that the question is covered.

Reporting a regulation as a summary of the law rather than as a list of obligations with owners and dates. A correct description of a rule that names nothing anybody has to do produces no action and reads as coverage.

Concluding that nobody uses a feature from an aggregate usage number. Low total usage routinely hides a small number of accounts that depend on it completely, and those are disproportionately the oldest and largest ones.

Planning against headcount multiplied by working days. That number has never been available in any team — it silently books support, review, meetings, interviews, holiday and the unplanned work that arrives every week at full capacity, and the plan is over-committed before it starts.