Coherence Check — Repairing Verdão Foods' Series A Before the Committee

A four-round, intermediate strategy-design and entrepreneurship simulation set inside Verdão Foods, Lda., an eight-person Lisbon plant-based ready-meals startup that has filed a €3.0M Series A with a venture fund. The plan is articulate and ambitious, but the fund's analysts have stamped it 'Strategy lacks coherence — fix or pass': the positioning, customer, channel, operations, resources and funding do not line up. The distinguishing flaw is the positioning–pricing contradiction — the plan keeps premium, chef-grade messaging while quietly modelling a 28% price cut to chase supermarket volume, so the healthy 41% gross margin silently falls toward 26% while burn (€95k/month) and the five-month runway stay the same. National rollout assumes 1,400 retail listings on one chilled line at 70% utilisation with no second site budgeted; three export markets in 18 months carry no regulatory or cold-chain cost (a ~€600k hole). Playing the strategy consultancy hired with 72 hours to spare, you transfer the coherence logic of Morais's Idea Puzzle method from research design to strategy design across four rounds. Round 1: diagnose the incoherence — hand back a surgical coherence map, not a good/bad verdict, and flag the two most damaging contradictions across Why/What/How/Who-When. Round 2: repair exactly two decisions (you cannot redesign the company on five months of runway) — align positioning with pricing by staying premium or committing honestly to mass-market, phase the channel to one line, or defer export — then re-run the ripple through margin, burn, runway and the funding ask. Round 3: prioritise the single highest-leverage realignment under the deadline, reframe the founders' export dream as deferred rather than denied to protect buy-in, and defend margin durability to the lead investor. Round 4: pitch the repaired plan to the committee and resolve its probe on residual contradictions. The math uses sticky penalty flags so the five classic errors — verdict instead of diagnosis, boiling the ocean, fixing pricing in isolation, ignoring founder buy-in, and low-leverage prioritisation — each cap the score and gate the top verdict: a plan whose core positioning–pricing contradiction is left live, or whose price was cut without re-running the chain, cannot read as fundable however well the other rounds are played. Final KPIs track plan coherence (0–100), investability, founder buy-in, and the funding need against the repaired unit economics.