Short answer
#Why these twelve
They are the questions that come up when somebody outside the company needs an answer: an investor doing diligence, an acquirer, an insurer, a large customer's procurement team, or a new technical hire in their first week.
They are also, not coincidentally, the questions that become urgent the day a key person resigns. The value of asking them now is that the answers are cheap to obtain while nothing is happening and expensive to obtain while something is.
#The middle group is the one to look at
Not the things you cannot answer. The things you assume.
"I cannot answer that" is a manageable state: it is visible, and it produces action. "I assume that is fine" is the state that causes the damage, because it behaves exactly like knowledge right up until the moment it is tested — and it is tested at the worst possible time.
The most common examples, in order of how often they turn out to be wrong:
- The domain is in the company's name. Frequently it is in a former contractor's.
- We have backups. Frequently nobody has ever restored one.
- Somebody else could deploy. Frequently they have the credentials and have never done it.
- Two people understand the payment system. Frequently one understands it and one has read it.
#The twenty-minute exercise
If you do nothing else from this page, do this. List the parts of your product. Next to each, write the name of every person who could answer a hard question about it. Count the parts with exactly one name.
Web application 3 people
Billing and payments 1 person ← Anna
Subscription logic 1 person ← Anna
Email and notifications 2 people
Infrastructure / deploys 1 person ← Marek
Nightly export 0 people ← nobody, it just runs
Mobile app 1 person ← an ex-contractorSeven parts, four single points of failure, one with no owner at all, and one whose only expert has already left. Nothing here is a failure of management — this is what an ordinary successful four-year-old product looks like once somebody counts.
#What this does not do
What this does not do
- It does not look at your system. Every answer is yours, and the tool has no access to anything.
- It is not a score, and there is deliberately no total.
- It does not tell you whether your software is well built, secure or fast.
- It does not evaluate the people who work for you.
- It cannot tell you whether an answer you were given is correct — only whether you have one.
Questions people actually ask
No. Every question here has a plain-language answer, and several of them you can check yourself without asking anybody — the registrar, the invoices, the cloud billing.
That is the ordinary result and it is not a judgement on you or your team. What matters is that the list is finite and each item has a specific next move. Most owners can close half of it in a week.
Use the reason that is actually true: you need to be able to answer these to an investor, an acquirer, an insurer or a large customer. It is not about the person you are asking, and it comes with a deadline that is not you.