Early in any endeavor there is no data, only informed guesses, and they should be treated as guesses.

The word “guess” makes people deeply uncomfortable. We’ve been trained to believe that business is about certainty, about knowing things. About data-driven decisions. But early in any endeavor—whether setting OKRs for a new initiative or estimating how long a feature will take to build—you don’t have data. You have hunches. You have analogies. You have experience with vaguely similar situations.