Post by Sandwich Lab

The final ROAS tells you whether the quarter worked. It can't tell you which decision broke it. A single outcome score collapses an entire chain：the learning period, the bidding path, the timing of every budget reallocation into one number that hides where things actually went wrong. By the time the number moves, the signal is weeks old and impossible to attribute. Two shifts change that. 1️⃣ First, decompose the judgment. Instead of one score, grade against a weighted checklist of what "good" actually means for each decision. Work on stepwise scoring (process reward models) consistently beats grading only the final answer — and it tells you which step failed, not just that something did. 2️⃣ Second, grade the route. Evaluate the intermediate decisions, not only the endpoint, so you catch failure earlier and can pin it to a specific action. Three disciplines hold it together: Where something can be checked deterministically：attribution events, budget constraints, compliance limits don't ask a model to judge it. Anchor it. Treat any model-based judge as a biased instrument. It has position bias, verbosity bias, a preference for its own answers. Make it show reasons; don't trust a bare score. Measure reliability, not a single win. A strategy that passes once but fails across repeated runs is a strategy you cannot hand a budget. For a system you'll trust for months, consistency beats a lucky high score. For growth and marketing leaders building decisioning they can actually audit. Full version: https://lnkd.in/djp_Y-S2 #growth #marketingops #aiagents #decisionmaking #sandwichlab #lanbow