Decision debt is sneaky because it looks like productivity.
People are “moving fast”.
Design is iterating.
Dev is shipping little things.
Meetings are full. Slack is… alive.
But it’s like running on a treadmill:
lots of effort, no distance.
If you’re having the same conversations every week — just with different screenshots — you’re not iterating.
You’re paying interest on decisions you didn’t make earlier.
The fix is rarely another tool.
It’s one brutal question:
“Who decides this?”
Not “who has opinions”.
Not “who’s in the meeting”.
Who decides.
Everything gets calmer after that. Almost suspiciously so.
Written by Ryan Taylor