Effective Decision-Making in Organizations
The Role of Product & Engineering Operations - with Emily Koehler
Effective decision-making is a cornerstone of a healthy, agile organisation. It impacts everything from business continuity to employee experience. For Product and Engineering teams, decisions range from what to build (prioritisation) to how to build it (technical design). When these decisions are made with rigour and transparency, they can empower teams, reduce risk, and drive better outcomes.
Product Ops & Engineering Ops practitioners are at the intersection of these kinds of business-critical choices, and can facilitate high-quality and timely decision-making by providing the frameworks, tooling and inspection that teams need to function.
Why Decision-Making Matters
Enabling good decision-making practices is a critical effort for several key reasons:
Business Continuity & Onboarding: Well-documented decisions help ensure that institutional knowledge isn't lost when employees leave. New hires can get up to speed faster by understanding the rationale behind past choices.
Professional Development: By empowering individual contributors and managers to make more decisions without escalation, companies can improve the employee experience and foster professional growth. This also requires a culture where people have clarity on their roles and are allowed to fail.
Prioritisation & Tradeoffs: Formalised decision-making helps teams compare different options and their associated costs and benefits. This applies to both strategic "what to build" choices and technical "how to build" questions.
What Good Decision-Making Looks Like
Good decision-making isn't about democratising every choice or involving more people in every meeting. Instead, it's about making sure the right people are involved in the right decisions, and that the process is transparent and well-documented.
Product and Engineering Operations can be champions of this effort by implementing context-specific tools and frameworks that enable teams to:
Improve Outcomes: Tools should solicit input from diverse audiences and require the evaluation of multiple options to avoid biases like the "highest paid person's opinion" (HIPPO).
Reduce Cognitive Overhead: By templatizing the information needed to make and act on decisions, teams can apply rigour without getting bogged down.
Increase the Number of Decision-Makers: The goal is to empower individual contributors to make more design and technology implementation decisions, rather than having to escalate every choice. This requires a culture where people have a clear understanding of when to "just do it" and when to escalate due to major financial or security risks. It also requires a culture where it’s safe to fail and where “fail” stands for “first attempt in learning.
Key Tools and Frameworks
Product and Engineering Operations teams are sometimes accused of being “process people”, but in reality, they’ve been handed the challenge of making their organisations more effective in solving customer problems and generating value. By using tools in their workbench, they can facilitate rigorous decision-making processes that help reduce risk, improve the flow of value, and ensure alignment among the various contributors needed to build the product.
I’ve used the following tools in both EngOps and ProdOps roles, and think you’ll enjoy trying them out:
Decision Logs: These are useful for capturing ongoing choices within a team or project. It’s especially useful when you have a long-running initiative like a migration, where staffing and priorities are nebulous and change often.
Request for Comment (RFCs) & Decision Records: These are ideal for highly impactful decisions, providing a formal process for discussion and documentation. For example, if you are considering deprecating a feature or rewriting a codebase, these templates will help you cover all your bases and document your decision-making logic for generations of employees to come.
Architectural Decision Records (ADRs): First introduced by Michael Nygard, ADRs are a useful template for documenting significant technical decisions. They outline the context, options, decision, and consequences, making the rationale clear for future reference. Having an ADR on hand can help avoid hindsight bias or an internal blame game, since you can clearly see the available information that went into a decision.
Prioritisation Matrices: Frameworks like the RICE formula (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort) or "bang for buck" grids help product teams compare potential features on a consistent basis. Product Operations teams responsible for planning cycles in their organisations make great use of this framework to evaluate choices fairly and ensure a balance between customer demands and technical realities.
Tradeoff Logs: These are essential for keeping track of changes to roadmaps that occur mid-planning season, such as those caused by layoffs or unexpected costs. Using a tradeoff log helps avoid a feeling of whiplash when companies need to pivot to seize an unexpected opportunity or react to financial conditions. Entries in these logs often represent staffing changes and prioritisation calls to start, stop, or continue a given project.
These tools are not meant to slow things down. Instead, they provide a structure to make decisions faster and with greater confidence by ensuring that a thorough, well-documented process is followed.
The Bottom Line
By empowering Product and Engineering Operations to champion these efforts, organisations can build a culture of confidence, clarity, and shared ownership. Ultimately, effective decision-making isn’t just about making the right choices—it’s about enabling a continuous cycle of improvement that drives the entire business forward.
Disclosure: I used AI to help me convert my self-written podcast outline for the Product Opscast episode (below) into something more consumable as an article.
Dive deeper into Engineering Ops - listen to the Product Opscast episode with Emily, Graham & Antonia now:
Product Opscast Episode 3: The View from Engineering Operations
In this episode of the Product Opscast, hosts Graham Reed and Antonia Landi get a fresh perspective of the world, according to Engineering Operations, with expert Emily Koehler, Engineering Operations professional from Expel.
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