"Judgment requires choosing what not to optimize.
The hard part of a status update where leadership wants certainty you do not have is not the technical detail; it is choosing what happens next while the picture is incomplete.
The failure mode is not choosing wrong; it is choosing accidentally. You see it in a decision kept alive because changing course feels like failure, where the system commits itself while leaders stay “open.” If you do not name the cost now, it will return later as rework, pager load, or a standard nobody can enforce. If you cannot describe the boundary simply, the boundary will not survive escalation and reorgs.
State the non-goal and the boundary that keeps scope from turning into a rewrite. That is how you stay decisive without pretending to be certain. Be calm and explicit.