# the challenge of not making a decision 2026-02-14 · 4 min read · #tech · #career Source: https://jopcmelo.com/writing/the-challenge-of-not-making-a-decision **the worst decision you can make is not making one.** I've seen indecision slow teams down more than bad architecture or tech debt ever did. it rarely looks like a problem. it looks like "let's think about it a bit more", "we need more data" or "let's revisit next week". ## what "pending" costs say the team has to pick between two API designs, and the answer is "let's get more input". here's what usually happens next: - engineers build around the uncertainty and add abstractions just in case - half the team assumes one design, the other half assumes the other - the PR sits open while everyone forgets why it exists - three weeks later the same meeting happens, with less context than the first one the expensive part was never the choice. **it was the limbo.** *(sketch: a fork in the road with a signpost for design a and design b, and someone standing beside it, still waiting)* ## speed is a small team's edge big companies have more people and more money. what they don't have is speed: every call goes through approvals and committees. a small team can ship in a day what takes them a quarter, but only if **someone decides to ship**. I once watched a team spend weeks on Postgres vs MySQL. the feature that mattered would have run on either. ## tempo *(sketch: a metronome keeping time)* one fast decision is easy. making them every week, across the whole team, for years, is the hard part. Steve Blank calls this [tempo](https://steveblank.com/2009/04/10/good-enough-decision-making/): making quick decisions consistently over a long time, across the whole company, and not only at the top. ## most decisions can be undone Jeff Bezos splits decisions into two types. type 1 can't be undone: you walk through the door and it locks behind you. type 2 can: you walk back out. *(sketch: two doors: type 1 is locked and goes one way, type 2 swings both ways)* most teams treat every decision like type 1, but most technical ones are type 2: - React or Vue? you can migrate. - REST or GraphQL? you can version the API. - microservices or a monolith? you can split or merge later. **undoing a type 2 decision almost always costs less than not making it.** Bezos ties slow decisions to [day 2 companies](https://medium.com/seek-blog/building-an-organization-with-high-decision-velocity-db9a29fde474), the ones on their way to irrelevance. ## decide at 70% in his [2016 letter to shareholders](https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/2016-letter-to-shareholders), Bezos says most decisions should be made with **around 70% of the information you wish you had**. wait for 90% and you're probably late: the context changed, or someone else shipped. *(sketch: a bar shaded up to 70%, marked decide here, with 90% marked too late and the last 30% marked learn by shipping)* the other 30% you learn by shipping, not by analyzing. ## limbo hurts morale too engineers want to build. when a decision hangs for weeks, people stop proposing bold ideas. why bother, if it ends up in a committee anyway? the best engineers I've worked with would rather have a clear wrong direction than none. a wrong direction can be corrected. **no direction just drifts.** ## what deciding well looks like - set a deadline. "we decide by Friday" beats "let's keep discussing". - give the call to one person, not a committee. - when unsure, ship something small and learn from it. - once it's decided, commit to it, even if you disagreed. - if it turns out wrong, change it, and nobody gets to say "I told you so". ## standing still is a choice waiting feels safe because our brains see more risk in acting than in not acting. that's [status quo bias](https://medium.com/seek-blog/building-an-organization-with-high-decision-velocity-db9a29fde474). but at a startup, **waiting is a decision too**: you chose not to move while everything around you does. when you decide, you might be wrong. when you don't, you're definitely standing still, and at a startup that means falling behind.