Below are some Excerpts from The Executioner's Manual
I was once asked to help out the management team of a budding young technology company. During my first meeting with the CEO, he explained to me that the management team was having difficulty figuring out whether the company should apply its revolutionary technology to building Product A or Product B. The team understood that it only had the resources to apply to one development, at least in the short term. To their credit they also comprehended that working on two products would be defocusing and hinder execution.
Market forecasts were speculative, given that no one had built either product before. Technology risk seemed about equal, since much of the work was common to both, and what was different would be hard to accomplish in either case. There were no competitors for either product yet and the development cost forecasts were similar. In short, there was no obvious analytical way to make a clear-cut choice between A and B. Some might say that there wasn't enough information to make a decision.
I asked the CEO how long his team, which included a half-dozen PhDs with state-of-the-art domain expertise, had been contemplating this choice. He responded, "four months. "And" he continued, "if we don't make a decision soon, we will not be able to raise our next round of funding".
The next thing I said was "we'll build Product A!" This engendered immediate objections around the table. One Vice-President complained that I had no business making this decision. He correctly opined that I knew nothing about their technology or much about their markets. Who did I think I was?
But from my perspective I had plenty of information to make the decision:
Without knowledge of the future, the nature of the decision was, in my view, most likely an optimization problem. Which product would be better to build now? Both seemed to have merit.
There was currently no obvious analytically-based way to choose.
A dozen really smart domain experts couldn't decide for four months.
We had to execute something or we had a 100% probability of failure.
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The company would cease to exist if it could not raise its next round of capital. If it didn't have a clear product direction it would not get funding.
Not only could I make a decision under these circumstances, but I felt absolutely compelled to do so. I had no choice. Thus while others viewed the situation as one where no decision was possible without more, unacquireable information, I believed that the facts as presented meant that we had to make a decision immediately. The act of deciding, not the product choice, was the pressing issue. The product choice, while it would certainly condition our future was the secondary consideration.
