My thoughts
I successfully re-discovered this amazing article by VP Engineering of Manifold at the time: Gary Poster.
It can be summarized as:
- If a decision will be cheap to reverse and have a low impact on its intended audience, just get some advice from a peer, as shown in the bottom left quadrant.
- If it will be expensive to reverse, or have a high audience impact, ask two or three stakeholders for advice, as shown in the top left and bottom right quadrants. In engineering, good stakeholder candidates to consider are a known subject matter expert, your squad’s tech lead or product engineer, or a pertinent source in Marketing or Product.
- Finally, if it’s both expensive to reverse and highly impactful, gather some data with rigor and present your proposal to some key stakeholders, as shown in the top right. Your proposal might be in the form of an RFC, a slide deck, or some analytics and a voiceover. Your stakeholders might include the previous group plus some more senior company leaders.
I am sad the chart was not archived though.
Read the article: Manifold’s Decision Making Process