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Decision Making

The simple definition of decision-making is that it is the act of choosing between two or more courses of action. In practice, it is often hard to make the right decision, and it can be hard to align a team around a decision. In order to increase the probability of successful decisions, the authors in this syllabus describe various frameworks for how to make decisions, what do after a decision has been made to ensure alignment, and how to make decisions within the context of specific departments, such as engineering.

What You'll Learn

Decision-Making Frameworks
Post-Decision Processes
Technical Decision-Making

Decision-Making Frameworks
- Gokul's SPADE Toolkit: How to implement Square's famous decision-making framework
  Gokul Rajaram, Caviar Lead, Square
  Gokul and the team at Square developed this framework to solve problems arising from consensus-based decision processes. The SPADE process covers the Setting for the decision, the People who take responsibility, approve, and consult, Alternatives, the Decision made, and an Explanation for it.
- DACI: a decision-making framework
  Atlassian, Editorial Team, Atlassian
  DACI is a framework that can help you male effective and efficient group decisions. The acronym is used to describe the role of each team member in a meeting or project: • Driver: The one person who will be responsible for following a process to get the team to a decision. • Approver: The person(s) who has final say on the decision. • Contributor: The person(s) who have knowledge that will inform the decision-making process. • Informed: The person(s) affected by the decision who isn’t directly involved in making the decision.
- How we make decisions at Coinbase
  Brian Armstrong, Co-founder & CEO, Coinbase
  Brian shares a decision-making template from Coinbase that covers setting the parameters, how to deliberate, and how to decide.
- A Leader’s Guide To Deciding: What, When, and How To Decide
  Steven Sinofsky, Board Partner, Andreessen Horowitz
  Steven explains how to make sure decision-making frameworks don't get in the way of velocity by making sure that a CEO or executive identifies whether they are an initiator, connector, amplifier, or editor of a decision.
Post-Decision Processes
- Durable Decisions
  Rushabh Doshi, Senior Director of Product Management, Facebook
  Rushabh details a process designed at Facebook to get decisions to stick. Even if you disagree with a decision, commit to it; but you can always re-open a decision if new inputs / circumstances have been discovered.
- Handling Conflict with the “Disagree and Commit” and “New Information” Principles
  Dave Kellogg, CEO, Host Analytics
  Dave covers two principles of disagreement: Amazon's famous "Disagree and Commit" principle for moving on from a disagreement, and the new information principle for when to revisit a decision after it has been made.
Technical Decision-Making
- Empowering your engineering team with an effective decision-making process
  Cate Huston, Engineering Director, DuckDuckGo
  Cate covers definitions for what does a good decision look like and a multi--step process for how to make decisions that includes: • Answer, what are you deciding (and why)? • Answer, what is the necessary context? • Foster discussion • Make and communicate the decision • Follow up on past decisions to see if they were successful
- Hypothesis-driven development
  Rod Begbie, Senior Engineering Manager, Discord

Decision Making

Decision-Making Frameworks

Post-Decision Processes

Technical Decision-Making

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