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A Guide to Smarter Decision-Making For Startup Leaders

Follow these three principles to keep moving fast, but slow down just enough to steer well

Julia Clavien
Better Humans
10 min readApr 14, 2021

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graphics illustrating key concepts of the article, e.g., light bulb, person thinking, fast/good/cheap Venn diagram
All illustrations by the author

There’s one thing I’ve done in leading tech teams that’s improved our performance more than anything else.

It’s been important when I’ve led teams in large companies, but it’s been crucial when leading teams in the more uncertain and unstructured environment of a startup.

I’ve worked on making smarter decisions.

I have to admit that early in my career I bumbled along making decisions quite unconsciously. Bad results often followed. Worse still, I thought that speed was the only metric that mattered in a startup — so everything was a snap decision.

Luckily, I stumbled across the academic work on decision-making. It blew my mind when I realized that decision-making is a skill! An important skill that I could hone.

In this article, I’ll share my experience learning to hone my decision-making ability as a leader. I’ll also share three simple principles I rely on to make smart decisions in the fast-paced startup environment.

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Better Humans
Better Humans

Published in Better Humans

Better Humans is one of the largest and oldest Medium’s publications on self-improvement and personal development. Our goal is to bring you the world’s most helpful writing on human potential.

Julia Clavien
Julia Clavien

Written by Julia Clavien

Curious to a fault. Technology | Psychology | Philosophy. All opinion subject to change. ☺ linktr.ee/juliaclavien

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