The right way to make wrong decisions
You are excellent at auditing business and an amateur at auditing the quality of your decisions.
Nord Media helps DTC brands between $1M – $100M+ in revenue scale by driving profitable growth utilizing Meta, Google and Creative Strategy.
Book a call and let's see how we can help you grow 👉 book a call with me.
Deciding sits upstream of marketing, product and operations.
Every campaign, hire, inventory order and offer eventually passes through a decision.
Yet operators audit almost everything except the quality and speed of their decisions.
You might spend six weeks debating a reversible pricing change and six hours deciding on a $500K inventory commitment.
Think about the three decisions currently sitting unresolved in your head.
Most probably you have no mechanism for determining when speed matters and when caution matters.
You've spent the last year hunting for cheaper attention. Meanwhile there's a place where more than a billion people park themselves for an hour a day, and I'd bet you've never run an ad there.
Mobile games.
Your brain files them next to ads for other games and moves on, and that reflex leaves a whole channel on the table.
A feed impression gives you half a second before the thumb moves on.
AppLovin flips that.
Your ad plays full-screen in the break between game levels, or the player taps to watch it for a reward inside the game. Nobody scrolls past, because there's nothing to scroll to. And the average view runs 35 seconds.
A few of the brands that are already buying into it are Bombas, Gymshark, and HelloFresh.
Standing it up is less work than you're picturing.
1. You install the AppLovin pixel through the Shopify app store or Google Tag Manager
2. Point a campaign at a goal you already run on like ROAS or purchases
3. And you're live inside an hour
Right now the platform is covering half your test: $5K in free credits after you spend $5K.
Start With The Door
Jeff Bezos gave the cleanest frame for this in Amazon’s 2015 shareholder letter.
He separated decisions into Type 1 and Type 2.
Type 1 decision is a one-way door. It is consequential and difficult to reverse. You walk through the door and cannot simply return to where you started. Those deserve a deliberate process, careful analysis and consultation.
Type 2 decision is a two-way door. They are reversible. If the decision turns out to be wrong, you can reopen the door and go back. Those can usually be made quickly by an individual or a small group.
Bezos’s warning was that organizations tend to apply the heavy process meant for Type 1 decisions to Type 2 decisions as they grow.
That creates exactly what you would expect: slower decisions, less experimentation and more risk aversion.
Now put your three unresolved decisions into one of those two categories.
DTC Operators Often Run The Framework Backwards
I noticed DTC operators often run the process backwards.
The reversible stuff sits in “let me think about it” for months.
If you're testing a price or a new offer, those are two-way doors. You can try them, observe what happens and change course. Yet they keep sitting on the desk.
Then the irreversible decisions get made in an afternoon because they feel urgent.
A large inventory buy. A brand reposition. A key hire. Financing that puts a lien against the business.
You’re letting the calendar tell you how quickly you should arrive at a decision.
You end up fast where you should be slow and slow where you should be fast.
Decision latency is not inherently good or bad. It should depend on the reversibility of the decision.
Think of decisions on two axes:
Good operators don't simply make decisions quickly. They match the weight of the decision process to the cost of being wrong.
Stop Waiting For 90%
Bezos returned to decision velocity in his 2016 shareholder letter.
His rule was that most decisions should probably be made with around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, you are probably being slow.
The last 30% of certainty can take weeks of meetings, analysis and waiting.
Correction velocity beats decision accuracy.
If you can detect and correct mistakes quickly, you can afford to make more decisions with incomplete information.
A reversible decision might only cost you a test budget, some inventory or a few weeks of opportunity.
Don't spend disproportionate time buying certainty when the decision itself gives you a cheap way to learn.
For your two-way doors, ask yourself what you are actually waiting for. Then ask whether that information will arrive before the decision stops mattering.
The Team Has To Move With The Decision
There is another piece of Bezos’s 2016 framework that operators tend to overlook.
"Disagree and commit."
Consensus is not required for motion. Alignment after the call is.
Someone can have a strong view and disagree with the direction but still commit to making it work.
That is very different from pretending everyone agrees before anything moves.
It also has to run both ways.
The founder can disagree with the team's view, then commit to their decision anyway.
The failure this prevents is relitigation.
A team that keeps reopening a decided question is slower than a team that was never consulted.
And when there is genuine misalignment, the answer is escalation, not endless discussion.
Name one decision your team is quietly relitigating right now. Decide whether it needs a new answer or simply a commitment to the old one.
The Decision To Run This Week
1. For one week, label every meaningful decision that crosses your desk before you engage with the substance.
- - -
2. Classify each decision as either a one-way door or a two-way door.
- - -
3. Two-way doors should be decided the same day, using roughly 70% of the information you wish you had. The point is not to make every decision faster. It is to make the process proportional to the consequence.
- - -
4. One-way doors should go through a real process and include at least one night of sleep before committing.
Final Thoughts
You have probably never audited whether the speed of your decision-making matches the reversibility of your decisions.
But now you already have a simple mechanism.
The more reversible the decision, the faster you should make it. The more irreversible it is, the more deliberate the process should become.
Do that across enough decisions and it starts to look a lot like superior judgment.
So go back to the three decisions you were holding at the beginning.
You now have a better question than “What should I do?”
Nord Media helps DTC brands between $5M – $100M+ in revenue scale by driving profitable growth utilizing Meta, Google and Creative Strategy.
Book a call and let's see how we can help you grow 👉 book a call with me.
-
-
-
