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# Sometimes the decision is outside of your control.
- URL: https://www.tariqdeir.com/decisions-outside-your-control/
- Published: 2026-08-24T12:12:58.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-24T12:13:35.000Z
- Description: Data tells you what's true, it doesn't tell you who decides. Those are two different jobs, and confusing them is how hearts get broken.
- Author: Tariq Deir
- Tags: Build the Thing

Three weeks ago I published the[ empty leg analysis](https://www.tariqdeir.com/i-analysed-50-thousand-empty-legs/) behind Empty Leg Finder, the SaaS platform I'm contracted to lead.   
  
Fifty thousand empty legs deeply analysed and cross referenced coupled with a heap of customer retention data, forming the case for a discovery led marketplace over search-first marketplace. 

This week the decision came back: return to V2\. Shelve V3.

And as I don't own this project and many of the decisions, here's what I've learned sitting with that and processing it. 

## **Evidence isn't mandate.** 

Data tells you what's true, it doesn't tell you who decides. Those are two different jobs, and confusing them is how product people break their own hearts.

Here's the shape of it: You're hired to find the answer, talk to users, run the analysis, follow the behaviour. You do the work honestly and the evidence points somewhere unexpected, perhaps somewhere better. You bring it back, certain the data will speak for itself.

It doesn't because data never speaks for itself. Someone with capital at risk speaks for it, and they're weighing things your spreadsheet can't see: sunk investment in the existing product, appetite for mid-year risk, promises already made to people you've never met. The evidence was your job, the decision was never yours to make.

That just happened to me. Three months of build and discovery work pointed clearly away from our current product toward a new concept. The stakeholders looked at the same data and chose the current product anyway.

They have a case. The existing product is revenue; my concept was a thesis. Pivots are expensive, and the people funding the risk get to price it. If I can't argue their side convincingly, I haven't understood the decision — I've just resented it and resent doesn't get you very far in life. 

## **Concepts die. Learnings compound.**

The product was never the only output. It was the *container* for the output.  
  
Let me explain. 

The last months of building and discovery gave me findings that don't care which product they live in. That our best-retained customers were the ones who barely touched the product, they wanted to be tapped on the shoulder, not handed a search box. That users search where they *think* the market is, while the actual supply sits somewhere else entirely. That the product I should have been building was a discovery engine, not a search engine.

The concept built on those findings might be dead but the findings aren't. Every one of them now shapes how I execute the product the stakeholders chose, from where I target acquisition, to what I make the conversion event, to which users I go and find. Same evidence, different vehicle.

I wrote last week that your effort isn’t the asset the learning is. It was easy to write when it cost nothing, but this month it cost me three months of work and a concept I believed in, and I found out whether I actually meant it.  
  
I did. But I’ll be honest, as I’m only human: it took a day or two of being annoyed first. Then you have to remind yourself, principles only held in victory aren’t principles. They’re predictions.

So the shelved work sits documented and waiting, and I execute the current product with full commitment, not grudging compliance, pure commitment.   
  
Market data doesn't expire just because a decision did and if the thesis is right, it'll still be right in six months.  
  
Catch you in the next one.   
Tariq