A Culture of Good Decision-Making (Part 2)
In part 1 of this article series I discussed the principles high-performing companies use to accelerate and improve the quality of their decisions. In this article I want to give you specific techniques to do the same, including the ACID model, not judging decisions by their results, and publicly killing HiPPOs.
In the early 2000s, while I was working for Microsoft, the company realized it had a major cultural problem. Most decisions involved many stakeholders (or just people with an opinion) who wanted to have a say, which led to long debates, escalations, and general confusion about who gets to decide.
Implicitly there’s a fifth group — everyone else. If you’re not assigned one of the four roles you simply are not invited to take part in this decision. That’s OK, you can’t involve every person in every decision. Still, be cautious of using the model to sideline people. If someone feels strongly about a particular matter, consider letting them be an Input-Giver, or even Consulted.
A sales rep approaches the Customer Onboarding product team with a request to tweak the onboarding flow to accommodate a specific customer need. A decision has to be made whether or not to address this customer need and when. The decision owner in this case is the product manager. The team engineering lead and designer are consulted, as is the sales rep and a member of customer support. The relevant product marketing manager is an input-giver. The director of product responsible for this product area is the approver.
