How to make better decisions
Every decision you make is either a one-way door or a two-way door – here's how to approach them properly.
Amazon is obsessed with experimentation and moving fast.
They know that discussing and researching can only do so much.
You have to go out and put your creation in the hands of people.
To get real feedback.
One key framework they use to make fast decisions and ship actual things is the one-way/two-way door framework.
One-way doors - these decisions are almost impossible to revert.
These decisions must be made methodically, carefully, slowly with great deliberation and consultation.
Often, they require a lot of capital, planning, and resources. And have irrevocable consequences.
Example: building a physical warehouse, raising money, quitting your job
Two-way doors - these decisions are changeable and reversible.
If you make a sub-optimal two-way door decision, you don't have to live with it for long.
These decisions should be made quickly by high-judgment individuals or small groups.
Examples: offering a new service, moving to a new country, testing new messaging,
Most of the decisions we make are two-way doors.
Yet we treat them as one-way doors.
Working in tech and not in a real "capital heavy & slow" business is a silver plate opportunity to test things.
The cost of finding out the actual truth is minimal.
There's no excuse not to do so.
There's no excuse to sit around and discuss endlessly like fools.
This is also how AWS got started.
Someone came up with an idea to sell their extra server space.
So they put together a paper to make a case for it.
It wasn't really good, and the team was like, "meh"- probably it won't work.
Every other company would've left it at that.
But then someone came along and said, this is a two-way door situation.
Let's try to sell the extra server space immediately if it succeeds- it's great.
If it doesn't - then let's revert back to the status quo.
And without spending time pondering about "what ifs," we find out the real answer.
The cost of implementing this is peanuts.
Today, AWS is the most profitable section of Amazon.
If we want to test new products at Wynter to see if they are worth building., this is what we do as well.
We offer products in a no-code fashion with 0 dev work(Two-way door).
Because there's no point in devouring expensive dev hours into something the market won't want. (One-way door)