14 August 2026 · Niran Chaiyasit
Marks that hold when the sample is small
A steep curve drawn from forty people is a costume. Counts, dots, and a stated floor keep a small sample honest.
Small samples are ordinary in the first month of a feature that only a district, a partner, or a single hotel brand can see. The mistake is to draw them as if they were large. A rate that moves from two people to five people is not a story about acceleration. It is five people.
At Lucid Workbench we keep a floor for the Feature Adoption Brief: we decline the full brief when fewer than 200 people could have seen the feature. Below that, a rate is too easy to shove around with one office, one campaign day, or one bug. We will still draw a chart plate of the counts if you want the marks on paper. The plate shows dots or plain counts, the window, and a limit sentence that says the rate is not the point.
The marks that hold are dull, which is their virtue. A dot per person across the weeks, if the count is low enough to remain readable. A step list with the number who reached each step written beside it, not converted to a percentage with a decimal. A split only when both sides still have enough faces that one person is not the whole side. If one side has nine people, we do not split.
Mira will not fit a smooth line through a sparse week. A smooth line is a claim that the days between the dots behaved themselves. With a small sample they probably did not. The copper ink is reserved for the mark we are willing to say aloud. Everything else stays in a lighter stroke or is left off the sheet.
There is a practical test before you ask for a plate. If removing three people changes the sentence you wanted the chart to say, the sentence is not ready. Tell us that. We would rather ink a smaller claim than defend a curve that collapses when a test account is found on Thursday.
Teams sometimes hear the floor of 200 as a refusal to help early. It is a refusal to dress an early count as a settled habit. Bring the early count to a workshop morning if you need a shared definition, or commission three plates of counts if you need something you can put on the table. Save the brief for the week the denominator can carry it.