How I help teams make better Decisions?
Using a technique everyone knows about but don't know how to use.
Hello 👋, It’s Vibhor. Welcome to the 🔥 paid member only🔥 edition of Winning Strategy: A newsletter focused on enhancing product, process, team, and career performance. Many subscribers expense this newsletter to their Learning & Development budget. Here’s an expense template to send to your manager.
It’s been 5 years.
I can still recall being called in to help fix a deep mess created by a team working on a feature requested by one of our B2B customers.
I entered the room. Whiteboards covered in sticky notes. Coffee cups were everywhere.
I could hear…the silence.
Here’s what happened.
A few months back, they planned this new feature. The PO called it “game-changing.” He wanted it done fast. The team agreed. They signed the contract. They bought tools. Heck…they even named the feature “Oracle.”
Three months later, they tested it with users.
One said: “Good, but not exactly what I was hoping for.”
It was not a “game changer.” It was a “game cancelled.”
The team wasted $80k and 300 hours. Trust in the team cracked. All because they decided too early.
Now, let me ask you something.
Have you ever witnessed a situation like this? Don’t get me wrong, it’s wonderful if you haven’t, but just out of curiosity, have you?
Have you ever felt that itch in your team? You know…the itch to commit before they are ready?
Here’s what Jeff Bezos wrote in a shareholder letter:
Some decisions are consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible – one-way doors – and these decisions must be made methodically, carefully, slowly, with great deliberation and consultation.
If you walk through and don’t like what you see on the other side, you can’t get back to where you were before. We can call these Type 1 decisions. But most decisions aren’t like that – they are changeable, reversible – they’re two-way doors. If you’ve made a suboptimal Type 2 decision, you don’t have to live with the consequences for that long. You can reopen the door and go back through. Type 2 decisions can and should be made quickly by high judgment individuals or small groups.
As organizations get larger, there seems to be a tendency to use the heavy-weight Type 1 decision-making process on most decisions, including many Type 2 decisions. The end result of this is slowness, unthoughtful risk aversion, failure to experiment sufficiently, and consequently diminished invention. We’ll have to figure out how to fight that tendency.
Anyhow.
Coming back to my team. I was there to help them fix the timing of those future itches.
My job was to “teach” the team how to make decisions so that such situations would never happen.
By the end of this post, you’ll learn:
Why is rushing to commit riskier than you think?
How to spot the point of no return (before it’s too late)
The invisible force that keeps teams agile, not fragile
Let’s get started.
How do farmers make decisions?
Let me tell you about farmers.
Not the modern ones with fancy machines and satellites. The old-school farmers. The ones who survived droughts, floods, and everything nature threw at them.
Do you know what made them successful?
They never rushed to plant all their seeds at once.
Here's what they did instead:
They'd take a small patch of land. Plant some seeds. Then wait.
If the rains came, great. They'd plant more.
If pests attacked, they'd switch crops.
If the soil was wrong, they'd try another spot.
Simple, right?
They never saw "waiting" as wasting time.
For them, waiting was learning. Each day brought new information. About the weather. About the soil. About what works and what doesn't.
But wait a minute!
What does farming have to do with my software team?"
Everything!
Just like farmers, our teams face uncertainty every day.
New requirements pop up
Technology changes
User needs shift
And just like farmers, the cost of being wrong is high.
Good news: You don't need to be a farmer to think like one.
Let me show you how Agile uses a technique similar to farmers'. Everyone knows about it, but only a few know how to apply it.
And trust me, it's simpler than you think.
How right decisions are made?
We've discussed farmers, seeds, and waiting. Now, let's return to the world of sprints, user stories, and code.
How do we, as Agile teams, make the right decisions?
How do we avoid the costly mistake of rushing into things too soon?
Well, it turns out that Agile has a secret weapon, a technique that's surprisingly similar to the wisdom of those old-school farmers.
We all know about it, but few of us truly understand how to use it effectively.