Make it repeatable
It works. Now do it again, with other people.
Why does the same work keep coming back?
Doing something once is a story. Doing it again, with different people, is a business — and it’s a completely different skill. I was much better at the first one for a long time.
What breaks here is never the product. It’s that every important decision lives inside somebody’s head, usually the person who was there at the start. Nothing got written down because everyone was in the room. Then the room changes, and the same argument comes back every few weeks with slightly different people in it.
For about a year I was that person. I knew why every component looked the way it did, and I mistook that for the system being in good shape. It was not a system, it was me. The month I was away, three people made three reasonable and mutually incompatible decisions, and none of them did anything wrong — there was simply nothing to consult.
The fix is unglamorous and takes ten minutes a week. Write down what was decided, why, what you rejected, and what would make you change your mind. Four lines. It ends an entire category of argument and it’s worth more than any process anyone will propose instead.
Be careful here, because this is the stage where teams reach for ceremony. Messy and broken are different things, and process only improves one of them.
Three ways to lose
time here.
- Adding process because things feel chaotic. Feeling chaotic and being broken are not the same measurement.
- Hiring to solve a decision problem. You get more opinions in the room and the same unclear owner.
- Assuming what worked at five people works at fifteen. In my experience it starts creaking at about eight.
Something shipped well while you were not paying attention to it.
What to check
before you commit.
Everything at this stage comes back to one question — Why does the same work keep coming back? Each of these takes a different run at it, and gives you a verdict rather than a score.
They are free and they take under a minute. That is the point: the cheapest thing you can do at this stage is find out you were about to be wrong, and the most expensive is finding out a quarter later.
- 40 seconds · 4 questions Why does your team keep redoing the same work? Which of four things is causing it, and the smallest change that stops it.
- 40 seconds · 4 questions Should you decide this now, or think longer? How much of your time this decision deserves, and the one check to run before you commit.
There’s a version
where I help.
Time inside the team
A few months in your tools, your standups and your arguments, deciding with you rather than for you, and leaving behind a written decision log that still works after I am gone.
Four questions on that page tell you whether this is worth it for you — including when it’s not.
Words this check uses.
- Decision log
- Four lines written the day a decision is made: what was decided, why, what was rejected, and what would change it. Ten minutes a week, and it ends an entire category of repeated argument.
About this stage.
Why does my team keep redoing the same work?
Almost always because decisions live in somebody’s head instead of in writing. Nobody is being difficult: they are genuinely remembering the same meeting differently, and without a record the loudest or most recent version wins.
What is the cheapest way to stop it?
A decision log. Ten minutes a week, one line per decision: what we decided, why, and what would make us revisit it. It ends the category of argument where everybody remembers the meeting differently, which is most of them.
Do we need a design system at this stage?
Only if the same decision has already been made twice, differently, and it caused a problem. A system is an answer to repetition. If the repetition has not happened, you are maintaining an answer to a question nobody asked.