I've taken "Show HN" out of the title now.
In the "We will open a new office in Amsterdam" example, it's expressed as just a yes/no situation, but peter@acme.corp is seen asking a question which is really an alternate potential outcome. It seems like a whole separate "decision" would need to be made for that, with its own pros/cons/questions, which would be very clunky compared to having that alternative discussed in the same place.
A different instance of something similar came up for me recently. I lead a small team and a member of the team is temporarily in a far flung timezone. We normally have a team meeting at a specific time which is very inconvenient in this far timezone, but moving to any convenient time would inconvenience the rest of the team. I considered a few options and ran a small poll, proposed a new meeting time for some of the meetings, and everyone on the team hated the idea, so we fell back to having it at its normal time.
I think a tool like this could have been very helpful for listing out 3-4 possible options and allowing people to express specific pros/cons for each of those. We might have ended up at a more optimal situation, but instead we ended up with the one that was simplest to express, discuss, and agree on.
All that said: even with that feature, I am not sure I would pay for this tool. I feel like the friction of introducing "a tool" for things like this, with accounts and signups and seats and process and payments -- it just isn't worth it for the pain it would solve for me. I feel the pain, but I'm not convinced I should pay someone to fix it, or that doing so would really make things better. I also feel (as a shitty developer customer would) that I could build this or something that gets me 60% of the way there for free, or accomplish it via existing mechanisms in slack/the team wiki, where my team already lives.
(but, don't listen to me -- prove me wrong!)
I like this idea, and I haven't studied the system enough to know how it works, but it will need to come up with a "framework," where action items are derived from proposals or motions. I guess that using the system would mean agreeing to use their framework. Maybe they can have a menu of different frameworks, but each org would need to adopt a framework.
- Getting all the info and feedback and allowing time for all stakeholders to vote can drive a culture of decisions by committee - while this does allow for great collaboration and engagement, it also can be slower than desired, and does not allow a visionary leader to really drive his organization. It also can make people who truly are experts in a field feel dismissed because now everyone is held on equal footing and their expertise is devalued. At the end of the day, people lower in the org chart will love it, execs will not. And without exec support, it won't become integrated into the org.
Your idea of bringing asynch discussions and decision-making is on-target. But I think you have under-estimated what drives people at different levels of an organization, and this level of transparency and collaboration is not what everyone will want.
In all honesty, I don't know how I would change the solution. I know that you need to continue to feed the ego of leaders and experts, while allowing contributions from everyone else, too. You have to balance different audiences with divergent personalities, and let the leaders lead, without the app feeling like lip service to non-leaders. In short, I don't think your solution is bad - I just think you'll find that it will take a ton of effort, listening, and understanding to be sure all participants truly feel the benefit of the product and there is no way to hit that mark on the first try.
from "Decisive: How to make better choices in life and work" https://www.amazon.com/Decisive-Make-Better-Choices-Life/dp/..., you might be presenting a false choice at the top. Is there a feature to prompt people to propose alternative paths?
from "How to Decide" https://www.amazon.com/How-Decide-Simple-Making-Choices/dp/0..., can you add a feature to list options and assign probability and cost weightings? (essentially risk/probability/impact scoring)
If there’s anything useful there feel free to scavenge, or if you’d like to talk about what I learned trying to build it let me know.
1. Usually, there is a larger context to decisions. Have you considered integrations around tying these decisions to frameworks like OKRs?
2. Usually, decisions require some form of execution. Execution also makes decision matter. People within an org should feel like not only they were heard, but when the final decision was taken by its owner, there was some form of action taken as a follow up. Sometimes the follow up would be merging some code in a git branch. Sometimes the follow up would be calling a lawyer and discussing long-term consequences. In any event, people should be able to see that something happened as a result of their input, within your UI. :)
Otherwise it’s really hard to introduce it to a corporation, where it’s probably most needed.
Another issue/checkbox:
Re: collaboration engineering, Thinklets: "No Kings: How Do You Make Good Decisions Efficiently in a Flat Organization?" (2019) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20157064
I might suggest trying other more granular voting systems instead of just up/down voting: 5-star voting, set number of points, or my personal favorite: prediction markets! A prediction market makes participants calibrate how much they believe in a particular choice, and also makes a clear ledger so everyone can get a sense of how often they have been correct in the past.
Here's one example of a market we set up for informing an important decision (which database our site would use): https://manifold.markets/Austin/what-database-will-manifold-...
* https://microsoft.github.io/code-with-engineering-playbook/d...
* https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/architecture-decision...
Find a way to include all five summary points at the end of that video into your product, and you'll have a winner.
Right now I see you only addressing one of them, maaaybe two.
I’m Linus, the other founder of TopAgree. We’re super excited to launch our beta today!
Why we built TopAgree Like many of you, we had lots of daily meetings. But with us, there rarely was a clear meeting agenda, or it was not followed, or even if so, someone was not prepared to make a decision. It often was a mix of private chat followed by opinionated discussions, ending in bad last-minute compromise decisions that were not actionable.
So we went on a journey to talk to experts and heavy users to find out if they figured out what we failed at. This is what we have learned about remarkable decision-making: - Providing relevant background and reason - Diverging - independent collection of alternative decisions and ideas - Converging - weighting ideas and choosing the best - Have a clear decision that is actionable
How TopAgree can help you? Automated process: TopAgree nudges all stakeholders so that you meet your deadlines Decision cockpit: All the information you need to decide in one place Decision log: Easily access all previous decisions
TL;DR: If you want to have faster and better decisions, get early access to TopAgree!
We are super excited to hear what you think!
Best wishes
"Join the waitlist and get access soon."
A Show HN needs to be something users can try when it's posted:
Off topic: blog posts, sign-up pages, newsletters, lists, and other reading material. Those can't be tried out, so can't be Show HNs. Make a regular submission instead. [...]
Please make it easy for users to try your thing out, ideally without barriers such as signups or emails. You'll get more feedback that way.
If your work isn't ready for users to try out, please don't do a Show HN. Once it's ready, come back and do it then. Don't post landing pages or fundraisers.
I think you don't stand a chance to have a substantial customer base in Scandinavia. Their decision making process is by iterative consensus. You hold the meetings on the topic until there is a collective agreement for unanimous decision. If there is not, you hold another meeting in a few days.
Doesn't the CEO / Project lead / DRI at some point just makes a decision and whoever does not agree have to "disagree and commit"?
