If you have to make a decision, how fast can you make it?
There is certainly a range of decision times. Some decisions require almost immediate decisions. Others can take a while. But no decision can take what seems like forever. In effect, waiting to make a decision is no decision. No decision is still a decision, except very few people realize it is.
That’s why management decision time matters and why I prefer to minimize management decision time. (The image above is from that blog post.)
But when managers don’t make decisions when they need to, they can introduce many kinds of debt:
- Management debt from delayed decisions. This is bad for product development. It’s even worse when people need feedback. And it’s much worse when it’s time to put people on a performance improvement plan—or fire them.
- Technical debt because the teams don’t know how or why to make tradeoffs. If you don’t know the drivers, constraints, or boundaries around your project, how can a team make good decisions?
- Product debt because without a sufficient product strategy that arises from—or drives the corporate strategy—who knows what product decisions to make?
Managers must decide when other people need decisions.
However, those decisions won’t always be correct. That’s why managers must learn to decide as little as possible, as fast as possible, and be ready to decide again when they realize this decision is not going to work.
If you’re a manager, do not delay decisions. Instead, make the decision as small as possible. That way, you can make it fast and not create organization-wide debt.
This is part of the intermittent series of management minutes.