Decision-making was broken at my company, then we did this

See 3 proven techniques that my product team used to fixed decision-making.

Teresa de Figueiredo

Product Manager at Coda

Decision-making was broken at my company, then we did this

By Teresa de Figueiredo

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Product teams · 6 min read
If you’ve worked on an enterprise team for any amount of time, I’d bet good money that we’ve had similarly frustrating experiences with decision making. Here’s how it goes all too often: You, a the product lead, suggests killing a feature that pretty much no one uses. → Everyone on the team, from engineers and UX designers to data analysts and the PM, has a different opinion, so a meeting is called. → Someone puts together a write-up, and you head into a meeting with high hopes that you’ll have the question resolved in a meeting. → But not everyone reads the write-up before the meeting, some key players can’t be there, and plenty of people enter the meeting with different ideas of what you’re even discussing. → Other one-on-one meetings are called, someone collects all of the opinions from all of the meetings, but still no decision. → Finally, the question is taken to the CEO, who says to shut it down. Is that a comically long series of events? Maybe, but this is only the best case scenario for this decision. What happens when customer success comes back and says a couple of clients are about to churn without this feature? I know you’ve been there more than once. I have too, but that was before I worked at Coda. At Coda, we’re big on facilitating collaboration, and that means we’ve spent hundreds of collective hours thinking about (and designing features to facilitate!) seamless team-wide decision making. Coda drives decisions for over 50,000 teams. Because we've been able to see how all these teams work, we've been able to identify the rituals of the most consistently decisive teams. Here are the steps that companies like Tonal and Figma have used to improve decision making.

1. Make sure your problems are correctly framed.

 One of the key challenges many teams face when it comes to decision making is the lack of a shared framework. It’s all too easy to get bogged down in unproductive semantic debates, focusing on minutiae rather than addressing the core issue, if you fail to establish a common framing of the problem. This can lead to decision-making deadlocks where conflicting perspectives cause stalemates, resulting in delays and frustration. At Coda, we start any involved decision making process by establishing a set of questions and picking the “eigenquestion.” This is Coda-speak for a question whose answer will help answer many other downstream questions. (Our founder Shishir Mehrotrha came up with this term based on the linear algebra concept of eigenvectors, the name for the "most discriminating vector in a multidimensional space". But don’t worry, you don’t need to know the mechanics of vectors to follow along here.)
Great framing starts by searching for the most discriminating question of a set — the eigenquestion. It’s important to note that the most successful teams I’ve seen do their framing together, ensuring they’re all more aligned for the conversations that follow. By clearly capturing the right group of choices in a simple frame, collaborators can more easily buy-in to the choice.
Try drafting an eigenquestion with this template

2. Clear briefs, complete proposals, can’t lose.

 When we face difficult decisions at Coda, we get things on paper (or, more likely, a doc) as quickly as possible. Other companies might call that a brief or proposal, but ours are called two-way writeups. And that adjective is important. Two-way writeups aren’t static informational docs. They always have built-in ways for readers to leave comments or feedback. The most basic way we gather feedback is by simply putting a reaction button at the bottom of a writeup, asking who has read it. The button looks like a little thumbs up icon that people who receive the report click on when they reach it, indicating they got that far into the doc.
The most powerful way we supercharge these writeups is by including Dory and Pulse elements, quick ways to take the collective temperature on a topic. Dory is a table, usually included in a write-up, where anyone can add a question about anything to do with the writeup. Crucially, it also includes another thumbs up button, so the team can upvote the most pressing questions. It’s a fantastic way to see what everyone is thinking—not just the people who are the most willing to talk on a Zoom call.
Pulse is a similar template, but it approaches team sentiment from the opposite way. First, each team member rates how they feel about something on a scale from one to five, and they can add a comment about that rating. It’s a fantastic way to turn a dozen different individual check-ins into one handy table. Give Dory, Pulse and reading reactions a try with the decision doc template here.

3. Multiply the effectiveness of product reviews with a Catalyst forum.

 Another Coda ritual called Catalyst has proven very popular at a growing number of companies. To hold a Catalyst forum, we orient our meeting around efficiency, namely by eliminating standing attendees and automating as much as possible. If you’ve ever had an upcoming meeting balloon from five people to twelve in the space of a day or two, you know how easy it is for things to get out of hand. Successful meetings are a balance between inclusion and efficiency, so asking people to self-select their level of participation is key. People can select their level of participation from not needing to be involved in the decision, down to calling out that they will have strong opinions. Designating stakeholder roles, from final owner to general brainstormer, streamlines any decision making process and allows us to run multi-threaded meetings. That’s what we call meetings where attendees split off into different Zoom rooms to cover the topics they care about, and attendees indicate interest and participation level when signing up for a slot. It’s an easy way to get through 10 different things in one meeting slot instead of endlessly talking about one thing. Catalyst meetings always include a decision doc with all the elements of a two-way writeup, which makes keeping track of results and action points a breeze. We also connect those docs into Coda’s automations. That means we can trust Coda itself to create and update individual calendar events for each topic, removing the calendar hold the day before the Catalyst discussion, send a Slack reminder the morning of a Catalyst discussion, and keep everyone on track after the meeting. If a perfectly divided, administratively automated meeting sounds like it would help your team make better decisions, try the Catalyst template or a simplified Stakeholder template here.

4. Decisions are only as solid as their records.

 That may sound hyperbolic, but I stand by it. It’s no use coming up with the perfect series of decisions if no one writes them down. At Coda, we have a few ways we record the results of our meetings. I have two decision log templates for you, one here and another here; they are simple tables that record the problem discussed, a potential answer, the solidity of that answer (ie. proposed, agreed upon, deferred), and the team’s confidence in the solution.
This is obviously just a great way to keep track of what conclusions a team reached during a meeting. There’s no fear of miscommunication or just forgetting to write something down when you’re all watching the words pop up on the same screen. That means you won’t be rehashing decisions or chasing down team members who didn’t write down their responsibilities. With these logs, everyone is on the same page, and everything is locked into a single source of truth.

Join 50,000 enterprise teams making decisions in Coda.

 We’ve built all of these decision making tools because we’ve seen what works for thousands of enterprise teams. The teams that use these decision-making techniques find higher velocity decision making, higher quality decisions, and stickier decisions. PMs at Tonal, OpenAI, and Luxury Presence have gathered opinions more directly and either cut down on meeting hours or started to knock out the majority of their decisions asynchronously. If your team could use hands-on help setting up a better decision making system in their company, talk to one of my colleagues today.
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