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A brief cultural guide on making decisions!

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Many decisions will fall squarely into one person’s role. That person is usually the closest to the problem, and has the most context for making the decision. When in doubt, lean into this ownership and consider yourself the decision-maker on something that falls into your role. If the decision has significant consequences or is not easily reversed, you may also want to ask for advice.

Asking for advice for big decisions:

Asking for advice is a natural and common part of making a decision. We encourage this for big decisions. In some cases, running it by your manager or a peer is all you’ll need. In larger decisions, we often borrow the framework from the book The Decision Maker by Dennis Bakke. The framework suggests asking for advice from the following individuals or groups for big decisions:

• Those with experience with the problem: anyone who has seen this problem before.
• Those in different positions in the company and with different perspective: people who bring a new perspective to the challenge. (This can include folks outside of Buffer.)
• Those with responsibility for the consequences: the ones who will need to live with the outcome of the decision.
• Those with ownership and ****engagement in the mission and its success: other stakeholders.

Once you, the decision-maker, has the context needed from these groups, you can go ahead and do what you feel is the best path.

Taking a lean, learning-first approach:

Often, the person making a decision may rely on data or experience to choose the best path. But in many cases, there may not be any such data or previous relevant experience. In these cases, we often try to take a lean, learning-first approach. There are more sophisticated definitions of “lean” in software development that you can research. (We recommend “The Lean Startup” by Eric Ries.)

What it generally means here is summarized well here:

• Experimentation over lengthy business plans
• Customer feedback (validated learning) over intuition
• Iterative development over up-front development
• Minimum viable product over full product
• Pivoting over persevering