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Decision-Making-and-Prioritization.md

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Decision-Making

  • Act Last, Read the Room, and Taste the Soup - by Rands in Repose. Takeaway: In times of decision-making, it's best to go last in expressing your views because by this time, everyone else has provided context you'll need to make the best decision. Also, take the temperature of whatever room you're in so you can communicate effectively, and don't micromanage.

  • Business Value Game - by Andrea Tomasini. Takeaway: an interactive game in which a "product management board" of stakeholders decides, in a manner inspired by Planning Poker, which goals to prioritize based on relative value to the business.

  • Cost Per Reasonable Decision (CPRD) - by John Cutler. Takeaway: "[W]e want rapid throughput of small, safe-to-fail decisions, coupled with focus and attention on the high-level strategic decisions that will set the course for the org for months/years...Consider the irony that many orgs spend $50k to make a single decision over work that will take two weeks to actually implement and test."

  • Debiasing the Corporation: An Interview with Nobel Laureate Richard Thaler - by Bill Javetski and Tim Koller. Takeaway: Thaler advocates writing things down to avoid hindsight bias and to keep track of patterns.

  • Decide How to Decide: Empowering Product Ownership — by Ellen Gottesdiener. Takeaway: Offers suggestions to help teams and product owners reach decisions without making assumptions about whether they’ve come to a consensus or not and includes a “gradient of agreement”

  • Decision-Making Auditing - by Tomasz Tunguz. Takeaway: "I’ll never know as much about a company’s operations or strategy or a sector as a founder/management team. But, I still want to be helpful. So, the most effective strategy I’ve found so far is to probe how the decision was made. Answer a question with a trenchant question, which coincidentally, ties back to some of the best advice I’ve received from a founder."

  • Decision Making in a Company with No Managers - by Jan Zborowski. Takeaway: Ensuring a safe decision-making environment for all employees is a must in a self-managed company. Letting ordinary employees propose an idea and then implement it, to jointly shape the company’s future, results in a low rotation indicator. A flat and transparent business model translates directly into clients’ happiness and a company’s growth.

  • Decisions, Decisions - by Dan North. Takeaway: A conference talk about decision-making, highlighting common tradeoffs made during software development.

  • “Do We All Agree” Is a Terrible Question - by Hunter Walk. Takeaway: We often confuse 'collaboration' with 'consensus.' The former is about engaging a group of people to work together and discuss ideas. It aims to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts. The best leaders are certainly collaborative."

  • A Framework for Making Smarter Decisions and Fewer Errors - by Farnham. Takeaway: Suggests using inversion, second-order thinking, and other concepts, and includes a list of articles for improved decision-making.

  • A Guide to Making Better Decisions - by Villi Illtchev. Takeaway: Be clear what you are NOT going to do; don’t waste time debating two-way doors; push decision making down into the organization; and depoliticise.

  • How I Think About Solving Problems - by Nicholas C. Zakas. Takeaway: "Each question is designed to reveal something about the problem that allows you to go to the next step, or if you’re lucky, just avoid the problem altogether." Zakas provides his five questions as well as subtle explanations and context for each.

  • How to De-Risk a Startup— by Leo Polovets. Takeaway: lists common risks and heuristics for risk mitigation and decision-making. States that showing is better than telling; external validation is better than personal opinion, and more data is better. Identifies types of risk, from product quality and recruiting to product/market fit.

  • How to Make One of the Most Difficult Decisions as a Manager — by Netanel Lev. Takeaway: Understand that leaving your job as a manager is a process with emotions involved. Find a mentor to guide you through the situation, have an exit plan, don’t blame other people or be blindly loyal, and trust your instincts.

  • In 2018, Focus on Quality of Decision Over Quality of Outcome - by Hunter Walk. Takeaway: "In any system with relatively low cost of failure and repeatable game scenarios, it would seem that getting the decision right is actually what matters."

  • Know Thyself: The Power of a Decision Journal - by Sam Kyle. Takeaway: The author of The Decision Checklist: A Practical Guide to Avoiding Problems makes the case for keeping a journal of decisions. "A decision journal will help you to slow down, reflect on and understand your decisions, and provide a path for you to get better. In the end, taking the time to think through problems will save you time. Not only will you make better initial decisions, but you’ll spend less time cleaning up the mess of poor ones."

  • The Naturalistic Decision Making Podcast - by Brian Moon and Laura Militello. Takeaway: a podcast featuring researchers who study people who make decisions under stress.

  • The 90% Agreement Rule - by Lawrence Ripsher. Takeaway: Ripsher asserts that "we spend 90% of our time, talking about the 10% of things we disagree on." This takes up time and energy. Instead, "[c]reate clarity (and build on) wherever there is ‘about 90% agreement’ first— then come back around and address the disagreements after."

  • Second-Order Thinking: What Smart People Use to Outperform - by Farnham Street. Takeaway: "Second-order thinkers take into account a lot of what we put into our decision journals. Things like, What is the range of possible outcomes? What’s the probability I’m right? What’s the follow-on? How could I be wrong? The real difference for me is that first-order thinkers are the people that look for things that are simple, easy, and defendable. Second-order thinkers push harder and don't accept the first conclusion."

  • Some Heuristics to Make Decisions - by Shane Parrish. Takeaway: a Twitter thread of heuristics for framing and assessing situations so that you can make better decisions. Parrish invites you to add your own ideas to the thread.

  • Square Defangs Difficult Decisions with this System — Here’s How - by FirstRound. Takeaway: "Gokul Rajaram shares a framework that he's used at Square and Caviar to make the most difficult decisions, all while assigning ownership, being inclusive and coordinating execution among all stakeholders."

  • Strategic Decisions: When Can You Trust Your Gut? - by McKinsey. Takeaway: An interview with psychologist Daniel Kahneman and scientist Gary Klein. “Society’s epitome of credibility is John Wayne, who sizes up a situation and says, ‘Here’s what I’m going to do’—and you follow him. We both worry about leaders in complex situations who don’t have enough experience, who are just going with their intuition and not monitoring it, not thinking about it.”—Klein.

  • 3 Ways to Ease the Pain of Slow and Frustrating Decision Making - by the Corporate Rebels. Takeaway: Change your language to imply empowerment; distribute decision-making authority by practice, and push decision making authority down through proper training.

  • Untangling Your Organization’s Decision Making - by Aaron De Smet, Gerald Lackey, and Leigh M. Weiss. Takeaway: "The ultimate solution for many organizations looking to untangle their decision making is to become flatter and more agile, with decision authority and accountability going hand in hand."

  • Why Humble People Make Better Decisions - by Drake Baer. Takeaway: A Duke University research study shows that people with high "intellectual humility" are more open to the information coming their way, as a form of "information sensitivity." This means they end up making more informed decisions than those who need to be right and ignore evidence.

  • Why Leaders Who Listen Achieve Breakthroughs - by Elizabeth Doty. Takeaway: Two-way conversations (as opposed to conversations in which the "sender" of a message focuses on their own half, instead of paying equal attention to the recipient's message and response) can make collaboration occur at a level that can be game-changing. Decisions become better and more reflective/inclusive of different perspectives and information sources.

  • Writing Great Proposals to Speed up Decisions - by Max Williams. Takeaway: Suggests using a format when asking someone to take an action—state the problem, solution, alternatives, negative consequences, and first actions.

Prioritization

  • Battling Perfectionism - by Julie Zhuo. Takeaway: "The problem is that trying to do things perfectly all the time often leads to worse prioritization decisions when you take a step back...The thing is, perfectionism tends to be rooted in fear rather than opportunity."

  • How to Prioritize Features and Projects: The Ultimate List of Prioritization Frameworks - by Jordan Lamborn. Takeaway: 111 prioritization methods dating back from the 1980s to the present.

  • [Prioritize Opportunities, Not Solutions]](https://www.producttalk.org/2019/02/prioritize-opportunities/) -by Teresa Torres. Takeaway: “Prioritizing solutions is a left-over side effect of being output focused. When we are judged by what we deliver, the key decisions are focused on what to build when. But when we are judged by what outcomes we drive, it’s less about what solutions we deliver and more about what problems we solve for our customers.”

  • Ruthless Prioritization — by Brandon Chu. Takeaway: “Estimate return on investment for each project; apply three constraints: dependencies, timeline and team composition, and sequence projects based on ROI and constraints.” Includes a template for triaging bugs as a tool for getting teams to think about priorities.