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Comment by bricemo | Hacker News Reader

Almost all of the hard decisions I’ve seen in my career stemmed from this one line that is glossed over: “when consensus doesn't occur it's because there isn't a clear answer or because there is a conflict between groups. In these situations it's up to management to make a decision so the organization can move forward.” This happens very often with design vs. product.

I was disappointed this wasn’t dug into deeper. All the examples given seem easy: picking a logo or hiring someone. But the harder ones are around things like “what is the overall direction for the company”, “who is our real customer”, “what is the main value prop of our product”, etc. In these discussions there can be die hard commitment on different sides from different departments. I don’t see a poll helping in this situation, and the author admits that too, which kind of makes the whole approach for simple decisions only.

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Ya there are some decisions that are best taken from the top like “what is the overall direction for the company”, “who is our real customer”.

We should absolutely listen to the views of anyone in the company who has an opinion but some questions require a lot more knowledge and maturity than individual departments may have.

In many of these questions, there are several right answers so we only need to decide the answer that we are most driven by. The people who are most invested in the company are the ones to whom such answers must appeal.

It's not practical in a lot of organizations, but something I like to do, when possible, in the face of a non-consensus decision is simply to wait.

That might seem inconceivably frustrating for people who like to make continuous changes - especially if the delay is weeks, months or even years. But sometimes a good idea or answer will develop during that time.

If a good solution doesn't emerge, then sure, it's possible that outside pressure may make it necessary to select one of the options anyway. But I think that's rarer than people expect.

That seems like good advice at first pass but now i’m sitting here thinking about entropy and chaos. If we choose “wait” - is that not an illusion?

E.g. should we go in direction A or B with our product?

Wait.

Ok - but still our market share is continuing to change, it’s just we’re no longer trying to influence it?

It's best applied in situations where both direction A and direction B lead to significant downsides, I think.

Instead of choosing one of those and getting stuck with (and having to justify) the consequences, wait until the downsides can be reduced, or an option C becomes available.

There are usually approaches to "validate" a decision before you make it into something that reaches the market. Employee testing, User testing and many other kind of tools that will provides cues if you are on the right track or not.

When there's internal conflicts, as much as possible it's better to let the market/users decide.

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