Creator Economy by Peter Yang

Share this post

How to Make Great Decisions Async and Avoid Endless Meetings

creatoreconomy.so

Discover more from Creator Economy by Peter Yang

Level up your product and creator skills in just 5 min a week. Get my “Top 10 Lessons as a Product Leader and Creator" when you sign up.
Over 57,000 subscribers
Continue reading
Sign in
Product Track

How to Make Great Decisions Async and Avoid Endless Meetings

Most decisions can be made async. Follow these five steps to do it effectively.

Peter Yang
Mar 1, 2023
48
Share this post

How to Make Great Decisions Async and Avoid Endless Meetings

creatoreconomy.so
1
Share

Level up your product and creator skills in just 5 min a week. Join 50,000+ readers:


Dear subscribers,

Today, I want to share my advice on how you can make great decisions async.

If you learn how to do this well, you’ll save your team from endless hours of meetings and they’ll love you for it.

Here’s my 5-step process:

  1. Identify key people

  2. Set context

  3. Use one channel for communication

  4. Use numbered lists for discussion

  5. Push for a decision and share it broadly


1. Identify key people

Every decision should ideally have one decision maker and fewer than five stakeholders to provide input. Avoid having too many cooks in the kitchen.


2. Set context

The decision maker should create a decision doc with:

  1. List of people involved

  2. Context

  3. Recommendation

  4. Options considered with pros and cons

Nobody has time to read long docs, so try to be as concise as possible.


3.  Use one channel for communication

Ask people to provide input in the decision doc or in one Slack channel.

Avoid starting a bunch of separate threads and then having to play a game of telephone to figure out who said what.


4: Use numbered lists for discussion

In the decision doc, ask people to discuss async using nested numbered lists. This helps keep things organized (think of it like a Reddit comment thread). Here’s an example:

Discussion:

  1. Peter: I like option B because of XYZ.

    1. Daniel: I hadn’t thought of it that way, let’s proceed.


5. Push for a decision

When it looks like people are reaching alignment, the decision maker should push for a decision:

"It sounds like people prefer #1, any strong objections to moving forward?"

Once confirmed, share the decision far and wide so that everyone is on the same page.


To recap, the steps are:

  1. Identify key people

  2. Set context

  3. Use one channel for communication

  4. Use numbered lists for discussion

  5. Push for a decision and share it broadly

If you do the steps above, you’ll be able to make great decisions async and only schedule meetings when absolutely necessary. This is a much better way to make your coworkers feel better than the following:

Twitter avatar for @petergyang
Peter Yang @petergyang
I schedule alot of Zoom calls and then cancel them to make my coworkers feel better
Image
12:11 AM ∙ Sep 10, 2022
3,226Likes283Retweets

Of course, sometimes a decision does require a meeting. Usually, it’s when:

  1. A decision has a lot of ambiguity

  2. A decision is a one way door (hard to reverse)

  3. Your decision doc has a lot of discussion without consensus

I’ll cover how to run meetings that don’t suck in my next post.


Subscribe below to level up your product and creator skills in just 5 min a week:

If you enjoyed this post, consider taking a moment to:

  1. Refer a friend to unlock my 180+ page PM book and paid subscriptions for free.

  2. Sponsor this newsletter to reach 50,000+ tech professionals and creators.

48
Share this post

How to Make Great Decisions Async and Avoid Endless Meetings

creatoreconomy.so
1
Share
Previous
Next
1 Comment
Share this discussion

How to Make Great Decisions Async and Avoid Endless Meetings

creatoreconomy.so
Aditya Anil
Writes Creative Block
Mar 2Liked by Peter Yang

The 2nd point you said about setting the context was the best one. A lot of confusion and misinterpretations can be solved by setting a concise context as you said.

Expand full comment
Reply
Share
Top
New
Community

No posts

Ready for more?

© 2023 Peter Yang
Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Start WritingGet the app
Substack is the home for great writing