As the startup I'm involved with has grown from 2 to 20 to 40 people, I've noticed that decisions take more time than they once did. This has been a positive change. There are a few legitimate reasons that we've become more deliberate:
1. We have more data available than we used to. It used to be that a lot of our decision were based on intuition and speculation. This worked pretty well because the people involved were experts in most of the decisions we were making. This doesn't work too well anymore. For example, how can a person know if moving a button 10 pixels will increase revenue on a website? You might be able to guess, but the only way to know is to do an A/B test. It used to be this kind of stuff didn't matter as much. Which leads me to the next point:
2. Decisions have bigger impacts than they once did. A 5% increase or decrease in conversion rate has a much bigger absolute revenue number associated with it. So, while we can still be bold about choices, we need to examine the impacts more carefully. There are more mid course corrections and final tweaks. This means that a decision is takes longer to become "final".
3. More cooks in the kitchen. We've hired a lot of talented people. So, we naturally have more ideas to sift through. More opinions to evaluate. More priorities to juggle.
4. More users for our product. A human acts one way. A group of humans acts in a totally different way. Making changes to our product offering can have very negative impacts even if the change itself is judged as better. So, we take more time to evaluate our customers reactions *before* changing everything.
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