> Instead, the real problem is the either 1) lack of knowing who makes the final decision or 2) requiring everyone must agree to a final decision. You will move a lot faster if you know who the final decision maker is, ideally have fewer (or only one person) making that final decision, and encourage people to make decisions quickly (most decisions are reversible anyway)
I'll add one more to this - not knowing how set in stone any decision is. I'm a PM, and I'm often the one charged with making the final call on many things. One thing I've often seen go wrong is a PM or an exec will say something like, "we should do x" in some review, and the team moves heaven and earth to achieve x, only to find out later it was just a drive by comment from said person, not something they deeply cared about.
One thing I've started doing is adding a GAF score (Give A Fuck score) to many of my decisions that have engineering ramifications, especially for anything that affects platform or architectural aspects. IE I might say something like, "this needs to have less than a 200ms round trip, this is a GAF-10" if something is direly important, and if we should commit significant engineering effort to making the decision happen. Or I might say, "I think we should go with approach A instead of B, but this is a GAF-2, so come back to me if you feel like A becomes untennable".
This way the team can move forward, but wont overindex on decisions that become bad decisions.
I'll add one more to this - not knowing how set in stone any decision is. I'm a PM, and I'm often the one charged with making the final call on many things. One thing I've often seen go wrong is a PM or an exec will say something like, "we should do x" in some review, and the team moves heaven and earth to achieve x, only to find out later it was just a drive by comment from said person, not something they deeply cared about.
One thing I've started doing is adding a GAF score (Give A Fuck score) to many of my decisions that have engineering ramifications, especially for anything that affects platform or architectural aspects. IE I might say something like, "this needs to have less than a 200ms round trip, this is a GAF-10" if something is direly important, and if we should commit significant engineering effort to making the decision happen. Or I might say, "I think we should go with approach A instead of B, but this is a GAF-2, so come back to me if you feel like A becomes untennable".
This way the team can move forward, but wont overindex on decisions that become bad decisions.