20kleagues

As a founder of a very young company, I am often faced with decisions which might change the direction of the company, or might have a big impact in a week or month from now. I try to think about the consequences of these decisions and what I will do in case any of those consequences occur (essentially forming a decision tree) to figure out what is the least risky path which gets me to my objective.

The problem is that this sort of thinking requires some serious deliberation (time-consuming). Some of the decisions I need to make are things I am ok with thinking a lot about:

- Should we delay releasing a feature until it looks amazing, or validate if users even need the feature while it looks imperfect? - Should I use a certain technology to build my infrastructure, is it worth being vendor-locked?

Other decisions such as changing the design of a feature, approving marketing decisions (some of the micro-things like ad-banners) involve spur of the moment thoughts, and thinking about those things using a decision tree would take too much time.

Since a young startup is often short of resources, I often have to make a lot of smaller decisions as well. Do you guys who have been in similar situations resorted to using a decision making framework which cuts down the time to make effectual decisions (especially when it comes down to thinking about unintended consequences)? Are there any books that I should be reading?