Lenny's Newsletter - My favorite decision-making frameworks
My favorite decision-making frameworksTemplates and guides to help you make better decisions with less drama👋 Hey, I’m Lenny and welcome to a 🔒 subscriber-only edition 🔒 of my weekly newsletter. Each week I tackle reader questions about building product, driving growth, and accelerating your career. 🚨 The Best of Lenny’s Newsletter – Volume 1 is now available for order 🎉The first batch of books is officially in production and pre-orders are arriving globally! The book includes 19 of the most popular posts of all time, including subscriber-only posts, and is perfect for anyone who wants to inspire their team, help an up-and-coming PM, or simply support a good cause. We’ve already sold through 70% of our limited-edition run of 5,000 books, and all profits go to charity (Black Girls Code and Give Internet). Grab your copy today.
Companies live and die by the quality of their decisions. One better decision can change the trajectory of your business. Yet important decisions often get mired in head-banging meetings, debates, and consensus seeking. And as your company grows, you’ll inevitably run into decision-making challenges. Below I’ll share several battle-tested decision-making frameworks that are designed to help you make better decisions more quickly and with less drama. Although no framework will make hard decisions easy, having a framework can significantly cut down on the head banging. First, a few caveats:
To help you evaluate these frameworks, and your decision-making process broadly, Brian Armstrong came up with a great set of attributes to aim for: Keep in mind as you work on your decision-making process, as Jeff Bezos said in his conversation with Lex Fridman, that “humans are social animals. Not truth-seeking animals. Important truths can be uncomfortable and make people defensive. Any high-functioning organization has to have mechanisms and a culture that supports truth-telling. You have to talk about that and how it takes energy.” To help you get to truth, here are my favorite (relatively lightweight) decision-making frameworks, in descending order from most structured to least. 1. S.P.A.D.EThis popular framework, by Gokul Rajaram, finds a nice balance between structure and simplicity. It forces you to clarify the problem, identify roles, lay out timelines, and explore all possible alternatives, without making the process too rigid. Most importantly, it helps you avoid consensus thinking while also making sure that the person who makes the final decision is also accountable for the end result.
Here’s a template, instructions, and an example. This framework is best used when making a major decision, at the company or strategy level. 2. Coinbase’s decision-making frameworkThis framework is very similar to S.P.A.D.E. but is more compact (everything fits inside a single Google Sheet) and includes some unique attributes, like allowing multiple deciders and giving the decision an expiration date. Since it’s so simple and compact, it can flex across most decisions.
Here’s a template, and instructions for how to use it. This framework is best used when you need a framework that you can apply to both big and small decisions. 3. Dory and PulseThis is a two-part meta-framework developed by Shishir Mehrotra (CEO of Coda) that dozens of companies have integrated into their daily workflows. It’s especially good at making sure everyone’s voice is heard, and flexing to all kinds of use-cases.
Here are templates and instructions. This framework is best used when you are looking to make decisions in real time (i.e. during a meeting). 4. RAPID...Subscribe to Lenny's Newsletter to read the rest.Become a paying subscriber of Lenny's Newsletter to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content. A subscription gets you:
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