How we make decisions at Slang.ai

I’ve found it hard to ruthlessly prioritize as an early-stage founder — I’m sure others would agree that prioritization is one of the most challenging parts of leading a start-up. Unsurprisingly, it gets exponentially more challenging the bigger the team gets.

We developed a decision-making framework to help us say “no” more often (focus matters!) I’m sharing the framework that’s working for us for now (team size 10–15) in case it’s helpful for any early-stage founders or leaders of lean teams who are making lots of quick decisions.

We have this framework in a Notion doc that we fill out anytime a big decision is being made (it can be a business decision or a decision to take on a new project).

Here is the list of questions we consider:

#1 Why?

Why are we thinking about this? Articulate this in 2–3 sentences if possible.

#2 Is this reversible?

Irreversible decisions deserve extra scrutiny.

#3 How much will it cost?

Quantify the investment in terms of time (we use “cycles” as a unit of time, where each “cycle” represents one day of one person’s time), as well as dollars invested, if relevant.

#4 What’s the business impact?

Quantify the impact this will have on KPIs and goals/milestones. It’s crucial to hypothesize the magnitude of the impact and weigh that against the proposed cost to determine ROI.

#5 How does this fit our strategy?

Important! Something may move the needle on KPIs but isn’t in line with our strategy. Or, inversely, maybe it doesn’t move biz KPIs in the near term but may be essential now (e.g., branding, company culture, etc.).

#6 What’s the expected outcome?

Self-explanatory :)

#7 What’s the probability of this expected outcome (Very high, high, medium, low)?

I love this question because it forces us to think about our level of conviction in the decision/project.

TLDR;

We consider seven questions when making a decision:

• Why?
• Is this reversible?
• How much will it cost?
• What’s the business impact?
• How does this fit our strategy?
• What’s the expected outcome?
• What’s the probability of this expected outcome?