Why speed of deciding now matters more than speed of doing

Fast hands, slow heads

Modern software teams can ship at pace.
Agile boards move tickets daily, CI/CD pipelines deploy in minutes, cloud infrastructure scales overnight.

Yet big initiatives still drag. Campaigns miss their launch slot, feature rollouts stall, competitors announce first.

The real constraint isn’t execution. It’s decision latency—the weeks lost waiting for someone, somewhere, to say “yes”.

Waiting is invisible

In ops, delay is obvious: crashed jobs, failed builds.
In product and go-to-market, delay hides in calendars and Slack threads:

• Leadership sign-off for a new pricing page (2–6 weeks)
• Cross-function debate on CRM integration (3–5 weeks)
• “Need more data” loops before a product bet (1–4 weeks)

No backlog ticket shows “decision pending”. But months disappear. A feature worth £1 m if launched before September term might be irrelevant by Christmas.

Dashboards don’t decide

Teams have dashboards for everything—DAU, NPS, funnel conversion, AWS cost curves—yet steering meetings still dissolve into opinion.

Data only becomes information once passed through an explicit decision process. Without that, leaders keep trawling dashboards while the market clock ticks.

When logic stays private

Executives often decide by gut—valuable, but opaque.
Teams then play guesswork: should we show churn cohort analysis, or competitor screenshots, or another user survey? Each round delays sign-off.

Make the logic visible and the pattern changes. A lightweight rubric—say, a five-point grid for green-lighting product features—lets PMs and analysts prep the right evidence first time. Debate shifts from personalities to thresholds.

Transparency accelerates

When criteria are clear, three accelerators kick in:

1. Parallel prep — teams load evidence into the template before review.
2. Better conflict — stakeholders argue the rules, not the people.
3. Faster learning — post-mortems update the rubric, compounding insight.

Example
A SaaS firm codified its launch checklist (customer impact, ARR uplift, support load, compliance). PMs self-scored features before exec review. Only those above the bar hit the roadmap meeting. Approval time fell from six weeks to two, with no loss of rigour.

Local vs global speed

Sometimes a team’s best decision still gets over-ruled.
The mature response is to fold that override back into the rubric so next time the team can decide autonomously.

Example: an engineering squad wanted to deploy a new API library; the CISO blocked it on security risk. The rubric gained a security-review threshold. Next cycle, the team made the compliant choice—no exec delay.

Common objections

• “Frameworks kill creativity.” They strip trivial friction, leaving more space for design and insight.
• “Every decision is unique.” Even 70 % standardisation halves cycle time.
• “My intuition is faster.” For you, perhaps. But explicit logic lets dozens of squads move without waiting for your diary.

The real stopwatch

Time—not cost or quality—may be the ultimate competitive weapon. Today, build speed is table stakes. The scarce resource is decision speed.

Leaders who externalise their logic create organisations that move at clock-speed, not calendar-speed.

Related: Applied Scientific Thinking · From Data to Information · Reading Guide