Summary: Slow decisions kill momentum. Here’s a 5-day playbook I’ve used with teams at LinkedIn, Facebook, and other companies to unblock teams and force clean escalation. If you try it, I’d love to hear how it goes.
👋 Hi, I’m Jeff. I write weekly about lessons I’ve learned leading product teams and working to lead well in chaotic environments, drawing on 25+ years of building.
⏱ Read time: 7 minutes
One of the strongest predictors of long-term company value creation isn’t strategy, talent, or even tech. It’s the speed and quality of decision-making.
Jeff Bezos understood this. In Amazon’s 2016 shareholder letter, he wrote:
“To keep the energy and dynamism of Day 1, you have to somehow make high-quality, high-velocity decisions. Easy for startups and very challenging for large organizations. The senior team at Amazon is determined to keep our decision-making velocity high. We recognize that this is essential and expect to accomplish it — in many cases — through better coordination and communication. Speed matters in business — plus a high-velocity decision-making environment is more fun too.”
Many scaled companies still struggle with decision-making. I’ve seen this repeatedly.
Decision-making becomes a massive time suck. The act of making a choice gets bogged down in meetings, alignment loops, unclear ownership, and fear of getting it wrong. Work slows. Teams get frustrated. Momentum evaporates.
The data backs this up.
A McKinsey survey of 1,200 leaders found that fewer than half believe decisions in their organizations are made in a timely way—and 61% said at least half the time spent on decisions is ineffective. The cost is also high: ineffective decision-making wastes an estimated 530,000 days of managers’ time per year at a typical Fortune 500 company, roughly $250 million in annual wages. Source: McKinsey & Company, Three keys to faster, better decisions (2019)
Many teams want to improve decision-making speed to ship improvements, features, and new products. Faster decisions create more impact for customers — and faster learning for the business.
But decision-making doesn’t just happen. Many teams rely on implied processes or no process at all. Teams are missing a basic playbook for how to clarify and speed up decision-making. Here’s the playbook.
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Playbook: 5-Day Alignment & Clean Escalation
Intro
Too often, teams debate issues for too long, leave decisions unresolved, or get hung up deciding which team should do what work.
Below is a simple decision-making playbook designed to help teams reach decisions in five days or less.
The goal of this doc is to help unblock teams more quickly.
Resources and links are included at the end.
Playbook
Once two teams with two ICs (individual contributors) leading the discussion are clear they are not aligned and can’t find a path forward, they should immediately shift from continued discussion to getting a decision made as quickly as possible.
These ICs then jointly commit to a five-day clock to get a decision made so teams can move forward.
Note: Many common sources of indecision can usually be resolved by IC pairs in the discipline best positioned to drive that type of decision. For example:
Priority — Product Manager
Experience — Design
Architecture / Build — Engineering / AI
Metrics or Impact — Data Science
The two ICs now write one shared document (very important: not two documents) with a crisp, clear review of the decision options. This is written collaboratively and ideally the options are binary (e.g., A or B).
The ICs align in the doc on:
The problem to be solved
A simple set of criteria or principles to evaluate solutions
The document should be no more than 1–2 pages and only cover the basics of the decision, including upsides and downsides of each option.
Simply doing this exercise can lead to resolution. Writing clarifies thinking and reduces emotion, fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
It’s okay if relevant managers engage to help find a solution, but this must remain on the same five-day clock and use the same one-page document to avoid endless meetings without a decision.
Each driving IC is responsible for ensuring alignment within their own team (including XFN partners like PM, Design, Engineering, and Data Science). It is very difficult to resolve cross-team decisions if teams aren’t internally aligned. This is more common than teams expect. This intra-team alignment should happen before starting the five-day clock or if not – on Day 1.
Engaging the right decider
If there is still no resolution as the one pager is created, the two ICs identify the correct decider, give that person a heads-up and jointly send the one-page decision doc outlining the A vs. B choice.
The decider asks clarifying questions if needed and then makes the call (e.g., “Thanks — we’ll go with option A.”).
Getting to the right decider is critical. Pulling in managers who are invested in local concerns rather than system-level outcomes simply repeats the disagreement and wastes time. Be liberal about escalating to the appropriate level quickly to improve speed and clarity. If needed, give mid-level managers a heads-up.
Examples:
Two ICs on the same team → their manager
Two ICs on different teams → a manager who can decide across teams
In cases where the decider’s peers are cross-functional, it is the decider’s responsibility to consult with those peers and respond with a unified leadership decision.
Once the decision is made, the ICs communicate the outcome and next steps back to their teams. The decision is then logged in project documentation so it’s visible in the future.
Norms & Behaviors
“Disagree and commit” encourages open debate during decision-making — and full support once a decision is made. This fosters healthy dialogue while ensuring execution.
Misalignment is not a failure. ICs are encouraged to escalate cleanly and quickly using whatever part of the organization is needed to unblock progress.
The skills that matter here are collaboration, crisp written communication, and working effectively with deciders to create clarity.
Decision speed is the goal. ICs who drive fast, clean decisions will be celebrated. Taking five days to produce a clear one-page doc that saves months of frustration is highly impactful.
Unclean escalation — backchanneling or going around a counterpart — is discouraged. Escalation should happen together.
It’s critical that deciders:
A) Decide
B) Do it quickly
C) Acknowledge and reward the ICs for speed and clarityManagers and leaders will be evaluated on whether their teams create decision speed and clarity. Issues that sit unresolved are a signal of failure to escalate effectively.
Pro Tips
Build peacetime relationships so escalations feel collaborative
Include mocks when applicable.
Include salient data points (experiments, user research), but avoid overloading the doc
One page only.
Helpful References
5-day alignment:
How to resolve conflict at work in just five days (Mike Gamson, former LinkedIn Chief Revenue Officer)
How to Escalate Disagreements Cleanly–A Coaching Conversation (Fred Kofman)
Clean Escalations (Atlassian)
Rapid Decision-making (Lin Haoying)
Decision speed:
“Sense of Urgency” (Boz) “As builders, we must make ourselves aware of the pain people are going through on a nearly constant basis. Every day people are frustrated by the tools they are forced to use because we haven’t launched our next product yet. Billions of hours of human existence are wasted on bugs and lackluster features in existing products. Minute by minute, second by second, our collective opportunity to make the world better is passing us by.”
Jeff Bezos outlines his methods for “high-velocity decision-making.” In a large and complex company like Amazon, different teams will have different objectives that no amount of discussion will resolve. Those conflicts need to be brought to more senior executives to broker. “Without escalation, the default dispute resolution mechanism for this scenario is exhaustion... ‘You’ve worn me down’ is an awful decision-making process. It’s slow and de-energizing. Go for quick escalation instead—it’s better.”
How SpaceX learned to make faster decisions. According to Forrester, for every hour a product team spends on heads-down work, they spend 48 minutes waiting on decisions. That equates to more than 3.5 hours of “wait time” in an average eight-hour workday. If a company cuts wait times in half, it can gain more than $370,000 annually in productive time across a 25-person team. This doesn’t even account for the bigger opportunity captured by a company if they can avoid delivering products late to market.”
If you try this with your team, I’d love to hear what worked — or what you’d change.
If this helped you think more clearly about leading teams or products, I write here once a week.
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