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38 The McKinsey Mind

every single effect of the bug. Early on, we try to catch the
critical bugs with widespread implications for the product.
Toward the end of the process, we catch the remaining 20
percent of issues, which allows us to tweak the product into
releasable form.

By avoiding unnecessary analyses and focusing first on the easy
wins, you put yourself in a position to get a lot done in a short
time.
Forget about absolute precision. Because we stress the impor-
tance of fact-based analyses in making business decisions, you
might think we’re contradicting ourselves to say that you don’t
need precise answers from your analyses. The truth is, however,
that business, for the most part, is not an exact discipline like
physics or math. Deciding whether to open a new factory requires
a different level of precision than discovering a new subatomic par-
ticle. In fact, in most situations, achieving a scientific level of exac-
titude for your management decisions is counterproductive. You
will spend an inordinate amount of time and effort getting from
mostly right to, in all likelihood, precisely wrong. Bear this in mind
when determining the analysis tasks for your problem.
This is especially true with forward-looking analysis. It’s one
thing to assemble historical data to answer a question such as
“How large is the widget market?” It’s quite another to answer a
question like “What is the likely return over the next 10 years if we
build a new widget plant in Upper Sandusky?” The answer to that
question depends on a great many variables, the values of which
it is impossible to know: future widget demand, arrival of new
competitors, changing consumer tastes, etc. Any number that you
can come up with will most likely be wrong. Therefore, you should
just try to get an answer that is in the “comfort zone”—direction-
ally correct and of the right order of magnitude. Often you can