I don't think this is advising you to spend all your time understanding the problem. Clearly, you can't ever have perfect information, and you can waste your ti

I don't think this is advising you to spend all your time understanding the problem. Clearly, you can't ever have perfect information, and you can waste your time in analysis paralysis. I read this post as saying that, given how product development is path-dependent, most people should do a lot more up-front discovery work than they are today. What I mean is, it's empirically very rare for people to just throw away a bad idea: they're more likely to modify it, pile more features on to it, or just delude themselves into thinking it will work eventually. But, usually it doesn't. We can say "be willing to throw it all away and start over when you learn new information", but in practice people don't do this. So, it might be more effective for most people to do, say, 50% more up-front work than they're already doing to de-risk their ideas before committing anything to them. It's clearly not a guarantee of success, just a way to improve your chances and save your own time.