Unique Original Articles » The Most Effective Way to Guide Your Decisions

Reading through one of Seth Godin's recent posts about decision making (does anyone tire of Seth? I don't!), it made me reflect on how we make development decisions at bigWebApps.

I noticed my brain immediately started ticking off the ones that we use from his list...but wait! Those aren't really the ones we use. What my brain was building was the list that I would love to use. So I had to consciously force myself into building the real list. And it wasn't too bad. So after spending a few minutes thinking about this from other angles, I came up with 3 lists:

The list I would love to use
The list that we really use
The list that we used in the past
The good news is that list #2 is much closer to #1 than #3. Progress! And now that Seth shook the cobwebs off this thought process, hopefully #1 and #2 will soon be equal.

If you haven't already navigated away and are interested in reading my interpretations of bigWebApps' three lists here they are starting at the bottom.

#3 How we made decisions in the past

It's something a major customer wants
It's cheap (but never is)
It's easy (but never is)
It's important to our community
It adds a feature that our CTO really wants
We've come this far and quitting now costs too much (this one is so painful)
It will increase sells (never as much as you think)
It's the next logical item
The thing about this list is that it's not really that bad. It's just too reactive. The major problem was the way we went about executing the list.

#2 How we currently make decisions

It's important to our community
We've come this far and quitting now costs too much (yep, still painful)
It will increase sells (better execution, hopefully)
The main difference between #2 & #3 is the fact that we have simplified and tried to maintain focus on what is important to our current community. We also have a few pieces of unfinished projects that need to be wrapped up. The entire team seems to be on the same page that this will not be the future.

#1 How I would like to see us make decisions

It's important to our community (using a page from Dell's website for this. very exciting!)
It will help us serve our community better (this includes more sells)
It's fun! (new addition, but should be a mainstay for any community-centered business)
So, in the future, if there is a fun project that will either help us serve our community better or is important to the current bigWebApps community, then fire up the wagons!
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