Running Decision Processes

"A curiosity loop is essentially going to a whole bunch of people. In this case, I sent out an email very quickly to about 10 or 11 people and asking them, 'Hey, here are nine topics for Lenny's Podcast. What are two or three of the topics that resonate with you and why?'"

"I looked at those values and I said, 'Well, if I draw a straight line from where I am right now and just extend it forward and play the rest of the movie as it plays out, given the current plot line, how well does that optimize for those values?'"

"How do we decide when we disagree? And that is a very good thing to explore because there's actually a lot of different ways to decide when you disagree... let's assume that the person who cares the most can win that argument. It might be, the person who's got the best perspective and the most expertise can win that argument."

"As you get senior, the only problems you'll see are ones that are fundamentally unsolvable because otherwise, someone would've solved it before they got to you. And so all you're doing is choosing which branch of suboptimal you're going to put your name on and describing the principles you're using."

"It's so incredibly necessary in improving decision quality to take what's implicit and make it explicit. It's not that intuition is crap, your intuition is sometimes right. If you don't make it explicit, then you don't get to find out when it's wrong."

"There is no such thing as a long feedback loop. And the way you choose to shorten the feedback loop is to say, what are the things that are correlated with the outcome that I eventually desire?"

"The word alignment is stupid... because it doesn't exist. You have 10 people in a room and they're all really different people with different opinions, and they're never going to come out of the room agreeing with each other. And it's really bad if the expectation is that they're supposed to... the meeting becomes coercive."

"I try to construct this past knowledge of what had happened and what were the decisions that were made and why were those decisions made, whether they were good or bad it didn't matter, so that I could better understand how to make decisions going forward and to learn from the mistakes that I didn't personally live through."

"It's not about making the right decision, it's about making the decision. ... as long as your decision is like 70% right, you can iterate on that 20, 30% in either direction, but if you don't commit, then you don't actually get any new information that is high fidelity and high quality."

"This concept of thinking gray is so often in life and in our jobs, we are forced to make decisions very quickly. We have to think black or white about a problem set or a solution, and then decide. One of his tactics is this concept of thinking gray, which is actually to not decide for as long as you possibly can before you have to decide."

"Every single project that goes out has a few minute video with Figmas and everything, and everything that shipped. Needs to be okay-toed, so approved by the group lead. There's nothing that can ship without that okay-to approval. And that okay-to approval has to be Glen, Carl, myself with different groups."

"The worst thing that you do as a leader is you hesitate on the next decision. The thing that causes you to hesitate is both decisions are horrible."

"The psychological muscle you have to build to be a great leader is to be able to click in the abyss and go, 'Okay, that way's slightly better. We're going to go that way. If everybody agrees with the decision, then you didn't add any value because they would've done that without you.' So the only value you ever add is when you make a decision that most people don't like."

"really, it's like all plane crashes are a series of bad decisions. And none of the decisions by themselves is that bad, but when you add them up, it's bad... if you can break psychologically, you can take the sunk cost, then that gets you out of a lot of bad paths."

"What happens to as CEO, it's like, 'Okay, if we rearchitect, this product, the architecture is not actually get us to where we need to go. I kind of know that. But if we rearchitect it, we're going to probably miss all the features, miss the quarter, have trouble raising money, shudder, et cetera. So that's really bad. And then not rearchitecting is really bad, and so I'm just going to try to and avoid this subject because I don't even want to deal with either of those.' And that's the worst thing, because if action is the better choice and that's good."

"The data rarely makes the decision for you. What is happening is then a lot of judgment and interpretation of the data, weighing that, weighing various factors to then come to a decision. That is sort of the right a lot part. The right a lot part comes from having what we call sort of sound judgment, which generally come... Some people maybe are born with this, not a lot of them, mostly they get it through experience."

"know how to make really, really hard high conviction decisions that actually can't be solved. You got to take a leap of faith and how to do that and bring teams through that type of ambiguity and then how to lead by example and have accountability when you make those choices."

"the first thing it argues is that the most important thing to figure out when you're dealing with any decision is actually figuring out how important that decision is. Since we're faced with hundreds of decisions in any given moment around the product or whatever, and that we're only human and we can only prioritize a few, you got to figure out the importance of them so you can prioritize. And so it talks about things like either decision reversible or not."

"If you want to improve the speed of a company, then make faster decisions. And fast decisions come from a bias of action. If we're in a meeting, we don't just say, 'Okay, let's circle back on this next week.' No, we'll have it done by next week. Let's stay in this meeting until it's done."

"If you're not sure who the decision maker is, one, it's probably you. And I'd rather you act that way than not because you're going to like slow the whole company down. Follow a process and get it done, and don't forget to actually make a decision."

"In the book, I talk about this framework that Bezos uses, type one, type two decisions. Is it high impact? Is it irreversible? Is it not? Really evaluate, what kind of decision is this? How hard is it? And then follow a process and get it done."

"the calories you spend on a decision should be proportional to the consequences of that decision... He calls them one-way doors versus two-way doors... I'm taking it one level further, which is, it literally should be proportional."

"ours is debate, decide, unite. That's our kind of phrase that we use in HubSpot culture... once you make a decision, getting alignment around that decision... is extremely important"

"Is it a trapdoor decision? Which I think is an Amazon concept. One-way door, or two-way door... Stripe was actually really good at being rigorous... about what actually was a trapdoor decision."

"It is the responsibility of the CEO to make brave and hard decisions unilaterally, yes, using their experts as inputs and be responsible for the outcome. If I make decisions that propel the company in the way that thankfully my decisions have, I get rewards and kudos... If I don't, I get fired."

"If you're asking whether you should pivot or not you probably know the answer already... give yourself a fixed period of time to take some decisive action and see if it feels better."

"Bias for action says speed matters in business and many decisions are reversible. And so it's important to go faster. And I think people don't understand that in a competitive environment, being right is good, but being quick is necessary."

"As long as it's possible for wherever it's like a two-way door, you can do whatever you want... If it's A one-way door, it's worth thinking about and sort of doing correctly."

"Is this a high stakes decision or a low stakes decision? ... magnitude ... and then, is it reversible? Amazon calls those, this was a two-way door decision. It's reversible. The one way door, those are the bigger deal."

"She taught us the RIDE framework for decision making clarity and it's who's requesting the change, who can give input to the change, who's the decider on the change, and who's going to execute on the change? So it's like R-I-D-E."

"Small startups agree on how they decide together. So after that, everyone just follow the process. That's usually how things work out... I think you just have to have a process so you don't rehash every decision after you made them a million times."

"We've put in things like we have something called RAPID, which is a really easy way to know who the decision-maker is... The R is for who's recommending it. The A, who has to agree. The I is for other people who may be able to be putting in an input. It's basically a list of people who need to be in the decision chain."

"Duolingo has very much, has a strong test it philosophy, we're willing to test a lot of different... Honestly, we'd much rather test it than debate it for days and days."

"We're using this tactic that we call work alone together. And specifically the note and vote is this method where everyone's in silence... writing down their own answers to this question... then the team's going to vote on those. And then one person who's designated as the decider... is going to say, 'Okay, this is our decision for now.'"

"I don't know how to make decisions by numbers or I don't find any joy in it, frankly. I've always been intuition driven and gut driven. And frankly, to be honest, I think everyone actually is... I think everything's a judgment call."

"Why is it that nobody on my team can make a decision without me? ... How does it make you feel when they make a decision that you disagree with? She said, 'I'm furious.' ... That's your growth edge. How can I be with the people in my life making boneheaded decisions about something that I care so much about?"

"We're in the middle of a meeting, we need to make a decision. Let's either make the decision or if we can't, let's Slack call in the person that we need in order to make that decision. And we'll be done with the decision today."

"I am anti-process as a substitution for deep product thinking... I like to have just enough process to create a frame so that the right decisions can happen and no more."

"I feel like my strength with the work that I do in general is just being incredibly decisive and understanding that there's 10 good answers to every one question... I feel like I can look at 10 gray sofas and go, it feels like there's two or three categories of sofa here, and then within those categories, there's a couple of good options. Here's a brand that I recognize is known for being of high quality. That one's good enough. I can get to it really quickly."

"Nothing is ever 100% perfect, and the most you can aspire and get to is 99.8 or whatever. That last 0.2%, you could spend your whole life trying to do that, or you could move on and do other things and understand that it's nearly perfect."

"What it tells us, and this is not exact, I'm paraphrasing for a podcast, but we make decisions in the emotional center of our brain. We use logic to try to figure out how we're going to feel. ... There's no such thing as a logical decision. That idea is like, I'm just going to be logical and just make a logical decision, it doesn't. Neurologically, it's just untrue."

"The other one that I find really, really useful and very hard to execute on until you really understand it is creating a set of principles to live by. ... if you really take a look at what it is you're making your decisions on and then really think about, well, what would be the five or six things that if I made decisions with these principles, I'm guaranteed success?"

"The better teams make high, better decisions faster... Company A buys into the whole idea of an extremely rigorous decision-making process. It's very process driven... Company B, maybe they're just all about this kind of mushy, diverse perspectives thing... Company C... very top down CEO driven."

"There's things like that out there. There's this thing Cynefin, which is a way to understand the systems and decision-making problems have, are you dealing with a clear system, a complicated system, a complex system, or a chaotic system?"

"The best decision-making is emotional... if you are on the other hand able to just welcome and be with whatever emotions would arise on the other side of a decision, you're able to decide clearly instead of being skewed one way or the other."

"The wisdom of the crowd works when the people involved with the decision are bringing diverse sources of information and judgment to the table... If you want to check your gut, get a bunch of different guts together, get a bunch of different people in the room who can bring evidence and intuition to bear."

"I think often the dangers of people saying, 'Oh, I don't have data to back this up. It's just what I think. And I'm not sure people are going to agree with me, so I'm just not going to say it.' So we don't have the data of all those gut opinions of these subject matter experts in the room, even though that gut information to me is just as important as anything we could get from the SQL database."

"One key attribute is there's one clear driver of the project, who's effectively a founder... and also there's one clear decision-maker that they go to... I think that's a big reason we're able to make decisions effectively, quickly, in a simple way."

"One relatively minor thing that I thought had a lot of impact with execution is being very clear that whoever is accountable for the results should also be the decider. I found that a lot of literature out there says that product teams should be this communal best ideas come from everywhere group... but I think not having it be super clear who is accountable and who is deciding often slows down execution a lot."

"PMs need as many reps as possible in making decisions, documenting the rationale behind those decisions, and then crucially seeing the outcome of them... Look around you. There's other teams that are making decisions. What would you do if you were in that position with the information you have? Great, write it down."

"Dharmesh Shah has this ritual from HubSpot called flash tags... It ranges from ... I think it's FYI, suggestion, recommendation, plea. FYI is basically like I had a thought, take it or leave it kind of thing. Suggestion is ... is this a hill I'm going to die on? And FYI is there's no hill in sight. Suggestion is there's a hill. I'm not going to die on it but this is what I would do if I were you. Recommendation is I'm climbing the hill. I'm not going to die here, but I've thought about this a lot, so don't ignore this. And then the fourth one, plea, is hopefully rarely used in the organization. It's like, I don't like dying on hills. That's not what we do here. But this is a pretty good candidate for it. You should really trust me."

"A very simple thing that he did probably in the last six months was he had a table of all the upcoming decisions and then at a tag-up ... he had all the upcoming decisions and then he let people hit a little reaction and say, "Oh, I don't need to be involved. Just notify me of the decision after." Or, "Hey, I have some opinions, but you can keep going." Or, "No, I really want to be heavily involved in this decision.""

"I will definitely think that I would be described as someone who's going more by their gut when looking at date end results... I'm very comfortable and very common in using qualitative responses and things like that and supplement to quantitative data to make a decision."

"If we had voted for whether we should do that or not, everyone would've voted against it or the majority would have. It was really a few core people of us in the community... that said, 'Hey, this is the future and it's going to take 10 years to do and it's going to be a long bet.'"

"I think where people get into trouble is when they think that they can rely solely on the data... I would think of your gut actually as a type of data and I think it's a totally valid one and it's just I think you need to be clear that that's what you're working with, but then it should be taken as seriously as any other data point."

"There's no right or wrong decision. There's just low and fast decisions... for anything that's reversible, anything that's not going to get you in jail or kill your company, no right or wrong decisions, just slow or fast decisions."

"A DACI is a framework to think about the different roles on the team on a project or an area. So D stands for Driver... A is Accountable... C is Contributor... And I is informed. And so it's a nice simple framework for when you are working across teams and it needs to be clear who is in what role."

"I think that putting out an idea, even if it's totally wrong, is a much better catalyst for getting to a good solution because people are much more likely to react to an idea than to nothing."

"When you started a new project, you basically had to organize what they called a murder board for it... the idea is, basically, you write up a two-page plan for the project. You invite three or four smart folks who don't know anything about the project and their job is just to tear apart your plan."

"Your job as to facilitate the pace and quality of decision making. That is very different than you are the person who makes all the decisions. In fact, I think one of the things that PM struggled with early on is how do you actually get the team to be able to make high quality decisions quickly without you arbitrarily playing tiebreaker all the time."

"You can't split test your way to love. ... This thing of building conviction on what matters, and I watch how teams slowly build this and you need the data there to make sure it doesn't become a hubris, right? That enables you to make much bigger changes than just experimenting away, and it forces you to get clear on what actually is the problem to solve here, and how do I solve it really, really well?"

"I found the model that people who aren't great at first principal thinking... is this thing called problem, cause, solution. So I learned this in debate in college and high school, and it basically is you have a problem that you're trying to solve. Well, you can't actually solve a problem... you want to break down what are all the causes."

"Tim Ferriss' fear setting, and he basically forces you to write down what are your fears, how could you mitigate these. But more powerfully, the second part is... And you're framing them around action. And so he reframes, what is the cost of inaction?"

"The idea here is that for important decisions, you should be able to identify one, one reason that on its own supports the decision. It's based on the observation that all too often we rely on a collection of weak reasons to justify decisions."

"Betterment is making that gap go away. And guess what happens if you make that gap go away? You can turn your attention to the next gap, and the next gap, and the next gap."

"I guess what I'm saying, Lenny, is one of my other tactical tips would be sometimes it is useful to pause for two minutes, or two days, or two weeks before making that decision, right? Because frankly, most doors that look like two-way doors are actually one-way doors. They are two-way doors at Bezos' level, but as a PM leader, for you, they are a one-way door, and that's making you busy."

"Dory/Pulse... Everybody writes down what they think and we hide everybody else's until you're done writing. So you force yourself to be eloquent about your opinion, on the record about it, and unbiased. And then the second thing we do is called Dory, which is instead of randomly asking questions, we ask people to put the questions on the table and then we take a round of up quoting and down voting them"

"Coinbase has a ritual... they have this subtle nudge thing... the person running the meeting pre-fills that with what they want from that person. You are an approver... I need you to tell me do we have the budget or not? Or I need you to tell me am I authorized to make this change"

"We get paid in product management to make decisions, good decisions, paid to make good decisions that will deliver business benefit. And a decision with too little data is fatal. A decision that takes too long and collects too much data is also fatal."

"Point A... had four stages called Wonder, Explore, Make and Impact... we basically write a six pager that looks at all the different aspects of all the questions that we're going to answer. And then we are in a meeting with the Point A stakeholders and the founders of Atlassian. And everyone reads that page for about 15 minutes and then question, answers, comments."

"Nick, our CPO like to say you don't have to have the best ideas, but you have to choose the best ideas. And so really figuring out how you're selecting what you're going to build and then living with the consequences... when we need to move forward, it is the PM that is on the hook for those things."

"We might be wrong but we're not confused. It's a simple phrase, but it has in my opinion, so much depth into that and ultimately something I really believe in. It's rooted in clarity and principles that ultimately lead to leadership."

"I wish I had... this idea of just being okay with being wrong faster. I always think about things on when we make decisions... I wish we had made the decision to do this a couple months earlier... re-evaluate your hypotheses and get into an uncomfortable space way more frequently."

"I'm in too many conversations where I'm like, 'Who is on the hook for this decision? Who cares if this decision is made?' It's not like six people with consensus. Who is the person? And I'm very big on people on count... There's one person who owns this decision and that's the person that we're going to empower to get all the context, get all the input, to make the decision."

"There needs to be someone that says, 'All right. We got to be clear on who the decision maker is here. If we haven't reached a consensus, who's the tiebreaker?'"

"Usually a meeting can be and hopefully a meeting is really either is a decision meeting. So if there is a decision, I need three options and I need a recommendation that should hopefully help focus the meeting."

"I love the concept of one way versus two way door decision making... If your team is making a really critical long-term decision that's going to be limiting to a lot of the future things that you could want or need to do, that is a one way door decision. And you should spend time really thinking about discussing it... If it is a two-way door decision, it's not going to make a huge impact, you can change it later if you need to, let your team cruise on those things."

"If you can get teams to align on first principles early on, it saves you a lot of heartache later because you've got people to align way early days before you even got into the design process, or before you had to start thinking about how do we actually technically implement this."

"We actually don't care. We don't want a daisy chain of approvals. We just want one person with whom the buck can stop with them, and they can be responsible for how the work moves forward."

"The idea that we have... is the idea of a directly responsible individual or DRI. For every project, we'll establish a DRI... DRI's job is to take all that input and make a decision. Not take all that input and do necessarily what's right by everybody, right? Still do what's right by the customer."

"You make you re-derive literally every decision that is valuable, every foundational assumption, every foundational ABC direction. And you want to see the observation you've made in the meantime since you last derived the next step. Re-running the entire function over the state that is now updated, the higher fidelity information, would you come to the very same thing?"

"Will anyone remember what we decided in six months? Because I think people stress out about a lot of decisions, but I increasingly believe most decisions people stress out about just aren't that important."