I’ve seen plenty of project grind to a halt from bad decisions and high pain thresholds. I think you’ll find and even mix in the overanalysis crowd of white tower thinkers and people exhibiting allergic reactions. If you are seeing more of the latter I have two theories. One, those people gatekeepe projects, so once bitten twice shy (ie they accumulate and add friction) or two, you are looking at more early phase startups than me. A seed phase startup locked in analysis never sees my resume, so I don’t see how often that happens.
But the trick is to start with the new Reversible decisions.
We don’t always know which are the reversible decisions, but many of the irreversible ones are obvious. For some reason developers always focus on the irreversible one. We reason that we have to get this right, because it’s very important. And if it’s important, we should do it first.
No. No. No.
If instead you start tackling all the reversible decisions first, you can make those choices quickly (because changing them is cheap, spending a lot of energy on making them is a waste of time and capital). Start building something. Get momentum. Get the team and ideas to gel.
When you start to know what you’re doing, then tackle the irreversible decisions one at a time.
But typically, everyone wants to Decide. And they want you to decide on short notice, right now, like some sort of used car salesman. If we don’t tolerate this from others, why do we tolerate it from our teammates?
Deciding for the sake of deciding is not productivity. It’s painting a floor when you haven’t identified a workable plan yet. There are always at least four corners, and rarely more than two doors. The odds are not in your favor.