I read an interesting post by Steven Bartlett (entrepreneur and Diary of a CEO Podcast host) regarding decision-making and the number of people having an input leading to a lower quality decision.

Whilst I agree on the premise of the concept, individuals making siloed decisions can have consequences, particularly when writing code. There is a sweet spot where a small, focussed team can make great decisions together.

Two recent examples:

A developer and I are deciding how our new Database design is going to look. We both have vast experience and we both have “our way” of designing.

Fast-forward 4 hours, we have a design for a new service that, since launch in January, has stood up to the test of time. Even now, it forms the basis for our ingress/egress platform.

You may have seen, in my last blog, we took the concept of Shape Up and took AML Checks from concept to delivery in 4 months. During this time we needed to make effective decisions as a development squad.

We’re all human and after beta release, we introduced a critical bug that was impacting non-beta users. We know, if we don’t resolve this quickly, it could escalate and snowball into something that cannot be fixed “easily”. By convening the team (3 developers and 1 QA) into a huddle, we triaged, found the error, agreed a way forward. This was at 1400. By 1630, we had a resolution, tested and ready for Production.

Efficient, effective decisions as a team of 4.

Whereas, when everyone in a team of 20+ has a say (or worse, there’s a 30-person meeting arranged to form a collective decision), every counterargument needs to be listened to and a decision “chat” ends up running through multiple meetings over the course of weeks. All the while, time is wasted, resource is underutilised and at worse, you miss your opportunity.

Keep it focussed, keep it small, make your decisions quickly and back yourself.