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We’ve found decision logs and our structured “RFC” process quite useful at Notion. The extra structure from a dedicated SaaS for this could be helpful. But to me the Pro/Con voting system seems like it’ll work only for Go/NoGo binary choices. What about selecting the best option from a suite of candidates?
We’ve found decision logs and our structured “RFC” process quite useful at Notion. The extra structure from a dedicated SaaS for this could be helpful. But to me the Pro/Con voting system seems like it’ll work only for Go/NoGo binary choices. What about selecting the best option from a suite of candidates?
I like the idea a lot. However, putting my company data - contacts info included - in some cloud makes me uncomfortable, so please comment or add somewhere information about how you (plan to) solve things like security and privacy.
Hi soco, great point! We think about encryption a lot as on-prem doesn‘t make too much sense. Would that work for you?
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-...
A side comment: 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"?
I built something similar. It didn’t really work as a business (or at least I wasn’t able to make it work) so I open sourced it: https://github.com/async-go/asyncgo 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.
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!)
A feature suggestion: a way to list specific possible outcomes, and have pros/cons/questions/votes relate to them. 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, whi…
A side comment: 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.
This is intriguing. Doesn't the CEO / Project lead / DRI at some point just makes a decision and whoever does not agree have to "disagree and commit"?