5 Second Decision-Making

Why is decision-making so hard?

One of the most critical flaws I’ve seen in product development at Google is when a project or team comes to a standstill due to indecision. And while this is most commonly true of more junior Product Managers it also happens at the executive levels, as well. The causes are often different, but the outcomes the same with the only difference being the severity of negative impact (hint: it grows with seniority).

Every decision not made means you’re the bottleneck. A project is blocked in some way from proceeding forward pending the choice of a path. Unless there is a meaningful reason to be blocked this is a waste of time and resources.

Therefore, one of the biggest keys I’ve focused on in my time at Google is fast decision-making, not to be confused with risky or ill-informed decision-making. I set a goal to make a decision within 5-seconds of any question. This goal has nothing to do with degrading the quality of those decisions when you take a more general view of the different types of “decision”. For example, a “decision” can be identifying you need more data, what that data is, how you’ll get it, and by when. It’s not required to decide on the path at that moment, but you must decide on the next step. The core principle being progress — forward movement.

It seems silly, almost stupidly obvious, yet I can’t tell you how many times an entire product team has been frozen because a Product Manager is unable to decide on a strategy. Moreover, oftentimes the value of multiple options are quite close, such that the cost of delay exceeds the incremental value of the ideal outcome from the option set.

To take an overly-simplistic example:

Say you are making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich — what I survived on Freshman year of college — and have a choice between strawberry, raspberry, or grape jams. To experience the same paralysis as individuals often do at work could mean you don’t eat for the day. It’s an extreme example, but completely realistic in the context of what’s commonly observed. Even though, the “ideal” choice (raspberry) may be only incrementally better than the other two the delay in decision-making comes at the cost of going hungry for a day. Which do you think is more important — choosing any jam or going hungry?

In my own work I’ve seen this paralysis with the launch of the next generation of interactivity on YouTube. From when we started the project, it was over 2 years until launch and one reason being indecisiveness around relatively trivial items. There would be weeks of debates regarding the user experience when the product philosophy (YouTube controls all of the rendering/UX) of the platform lends itself to UX iteration and changes over time. In this case, “ideal” got in the way of “good enough”, costing months of the roadmap from not having the feature in creator’s hands sooner to provide value and iterate based on learnings.

Often, just making a choice, even when wrong, provides value in learning. Yes, Silicon Valley has taken the virtues of failure to an extreme, but the root good of it is because we still learn and grow from our failures. We don’t make any progress frozen in indecision, though…

One of the best small ways I’ve found to help projects keep moving forward is when an engineer, or anyone, asks low impact questions like, “Is (a) or (b) more important?” to give an answer at that moment. Even if I’m wrong it’s often the case that keeping him or her unblocked is of greater value than the 1+ days it would otherwise have taken to be 100% right. These are small moments that add up over time.

With that, here are some tips for how to reduce that decision-making time, which should, all go well, increase your team’s execution velocity and success:

1. Be fearless. Fear is a retardant to high-quality analysis by prematurely excluding options with positive outcomes due to concerns over social impact (ridicule, exclusion, etc.). This is number 1 for a reason.
2. Share the burden if you’re unsure. If you do have fear of being wrong, you can lift this burden by engaging a group to come to a decision. While group decision-making comes with it’s own perils, it does distribute burden and responsibility, lightening the individual load.
3. Reduce the option set to 2 if it’s overly complex. It’s easier to choose between 2 options than 3, 4, etc. Going through a process of elimination can be effective to narrow down.
4. Get more information, if you need it and can get it. Don’t confuse moving fast with being reckless. Still base decisions in analysis and data, so if you feel that’s insufficient form an action plan to get what you need.
5. Go to #1 if you’re unable to get more information. Sometimes we need to take leaps and use our instincts or gut in place of perfect information. However, there is intrinsic value in a decision — be fearless.
6. Ignore the scope of medium-to-high impact decisions. People often equate the impact of a decision to the length it should take to make it. High impact decisions can be obvious — “do all people deserve the right to free speech?” — and low impact ones can be very complex — “which came first, the chicken or the egg?”. One of the worst habits is to use the “size” of the decision as a rationale for delay, especially as the impact grows larger. If you have all the critical information you’re going to be able to get, nothing is going to change. There is no meaningful reason for delay.

Avi is a Product Manager on YouTube Monetization at Google. The above are his own views and do not represent those of Google/YouTube.