When I was interviewing candidates for analyst positions at my former employer, I would often engage in a friendly exercise of “cognitive estimation.”  We all use cognitive estimation  to answer a question, when the exact answer is unknowable, or difficult to know without expensive or difficult measurement.  Clinical neuropsychologists use normed tests of cognitive estimation to evaluate the impact of brain injury, dementia,  and Alzheimer’s disease in patients.  Back at the market research company, I made up my own examples to assess the “common sense” and thinking process of applicants. Here’s an example: 

“How many gallons of ice cream were sold in Massachusetts in the month of July, 2007?”  

You could spend a lot of money with research houses, point-of-sale tracking systems, or field observers, and come up with some rather precise numbers.  Or you could take the total number of Massachusetts residents, multiply by some reasonable estimate of daily ice cream consumption on warm days (something more than a spoonful and less than a quart, I’d guess) and multiply that by 31 days, and get to a good-enough, back-of-the-napkin answer.  This back-of-the-napkin analysis is exactly what seems to be missing in some startups, and it’s exactly the kind of analysis that marketing needs to be doing before product development engages too much engineering talent.

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