All work is a sequence of decisions that can be usefully understood for their deeper dimensionality beyond strategic, social, technical, and operational.
Startups fundamentally win through good decisions that are fast enough and correct enough. The most impactful decisions are like keys, driving most progress towards success and most prevention from failure. Many decisions are naturally sufficient through existing best practices and common skills; these are commodity decisions. What remains are the opportunities where unusual decisions optimally satisfy the target user-customer base.
Decision Modeling
Everyone knows that decisions vary in importance. Yet, in practice, focusing on important decisions is surprisingly uncommon (Parkinson's Law of Triviality; bike-shed effect). Such absence of skill in the presence of knowledge exemplifies underlying causes of startup failure inside the general decision-making process.
The best decision is sometimes the obvious one, apparent to all; sometimes a non-obvious best practice, known to experts; sometimes a perspective-shifting breakthrough, discernible to innovators. Such categorization of decision optimality helps avoid catastrophic undercompletion and wasteful overcompletion of decision opportunities, because the best time to predict the best approach for making a decision is before starting to think about that decision inside any approach.
Important-Optimal Decision Matrix
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Key Commodity Decision (KCD)
Convention Optimal
Buy and ensure excellence
|
Key Unusual Decision (KUD)
Innovation Optimal
Understand and strengthen uniquely
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|
Commodity Decision (CD)
Routine
Automate and delegate
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Unusual Decision (UD)
Potential Distraction
Minimize time spent
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Examples
| Decision Slot | Decision Type | Evaluation |
|---|---|---|
| Which USB connector type for a new consumer product | KCD | Optimal answer, obvious to all, is USB-C. Any legacy connector would greatly hurt the user experience. |
| What is the missing ingredient for virally scalable general-purpose robotics? | KUD | Simple answer, known to experts, is more variation-tolerant software design. Optimal specific answer is yet unknown/unbuilt. |
| Which video-conferencing platform to use for meetings | CD | Minimal switching cost and sunk cost. |
| What business phone number would be distinctly memorable to customers? | UD | Space and avionic engineers/technicians might resonate with "28" because 28VDC is common for mission vehicles. |
Decisions often come in batches. For example, deciding to use USB-C (KCD) leads to choosing a specific USB-C connector (CD) and port location (possibly UD). Notice these adjacent decisions have different importance-optimality types. People often fall into the blanket categorization heuristic trap, confusing distinct but related decisions as the same type, risking accidentally overlooking key decisions, overthinking non-key decisions, or thinking about them with the wrong approach (use commodity vs seek innovation). Clear decision granularity facilitates optimal focus and methodology.
Important decisions are not always necessary; importantly necessary decisions can have surprisingly hard pass-fail thresholds of sufficiency. Many startups have succeeded despite making weak key decisions, by compensating with strong key decisions elsewhere. Such imbalanced execution only works when the target market and solution involve low decision criticality. Everyone knows that the best consumer product can fail with insufficient marketing; the best marketing can fail with an insufficient product. Less obvious is that a great business-focused founder can hire the best product developers in the world yet fail in a product-critical market because its granular threshold required hard innovation, not intense engineering. For example, in general-purpose robotics where the critical threshold is AI design (KUD), it is possible to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on excellent commodity decisions while never achieving critical product-market sufficiency for profitable venture scale deployment.
Multi-Critical Founder-Market Fit
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Founder Strengths
For Hard Critical Decisions
Force must exceed the success barrier
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Founder Preferences
For Continuous Critical Decisions
Enjoyment sustains high quality assurance
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Founder Beliefs
For Broad Critical Decisions
Correctness matches market/solution conditions
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Founder Empathy
For Experiential Critical Decisions
Vision of ideal user experience guides best possible product
|
Something that is correct can be incorrect under different circumstances. For instance, a complex yet feature-packed user interface that is perfect for experts (ex. advanced airplane cockpit for pilots) can be overwhelming for most people. Clearly, different target markets can cause the same decision to vary wildly in correctness and its underlying importance-optimality-criticality. Such decision relativity is a reminder that decisions are often only conditionally correct. When decision-makers skip contextual consideration for convenience, they risk not only being wrong that time, but also forgetting the nuances that enable holistic cognition, making their expertise increasingly brittle.
Beyond identifying useful decision characteristics, assigning them accurately to atomic decision opportunities, illuminating deeper characteristics, and accounting for contextual correctness, the critical composition of decisions constitutes progress that ultimately drives every action in the real world.