Variance note, period to 2026-09-21

A variance note explains the gap between what the model said and what happened. This one has an unusual gap to explain.

The variance

Planned: a board pack with figures in section 3.

Actual: a board pack with section 3 marked open.

Cause: the figures do not exist in a form anyone approved. product-facts.md records the numbers section as open, with the note that no figures were supplied and none reproduce from a repository or report in scope (N-1).

Why this is reported as a variance rather than a footnote

Because the alternative was available and we did not take it.

Plausible figures could have been produced. Hosting and source control costs at this scale are public list prices. A burn number could have been assembled from them, and a runway figure divided out of it. It would have looked like a finished board pack and read like one.

It would also have been a number nobody could trace, sitting in a document whose whole purpose is that its numbers are traceable. The first person to ask where it came from would have found out, and everything else in the pack would have been worth less afterwards.

So the variance is reported: the pack is short by design, and this note is the reason.

Second-order effect

The missing figures are on the critical path for more than this pack. Owner review of product-facts.md is due 2026-10-03 (T-4), and wave 2 does not start until it is signed off (T-5). A slip on that date is a slip on both, and the two should be tracked as one item rather than two.

What closes it

One thing: N-1 filled in and approved. When that lands, section 3 of the board pack fills from it, the first real close (steps 2 through 8 of the checklist) has something to run against, and the next variance note goes back to being about money.

Threshold for next period

From the first close with data, a variance is written up when a line differs from the model by more than 10 percent or by more than one month of runway, whichever is smaller. Below that, it is noise and writing it up trains people to skip the section.