Decision Reviews

Rotating partners bring practical organizational constraints into the review without making it a large committee. A weekly 15-minute decision review spreads the decision habit and prevents one contributor from becoming a bottleneck. The opposite-question exposes assumptions, risks, and tradeoffs without creating an open-ended debate. Rotating a partner from support, SRE, or finance ties engineering decisions to adjacent stakeholder concerns. Decision reviews should test failure modes by asking what would break if the opposite decision were made. The decision review format is to read two decision records, limit each to seven minutes, and ask what would break if the opposite were done. The review should cover no more than two decisions, with seven minutes for each decision. Each reviewed decision should include a rotating partner from support, sales, or finance.