Past Decisions Live in Someone's Head, Nowhere Else
Product and engineering teams are losing critical context around past decisions, leading to repeated discussions, wasted time, and a lack of shared understanding. This manifests as teams re-litigating settled issues, difficulty justifying decisions, and a reliance on fragmented information sources. A better system for capturing and accessing decision rationale is needed.
SOURCES (60)
“Ya but we want principle of least privilege and it happens more often then you’d think since everyone just uses there damn phone on the field then bitch when they have to log onto the laptop for what ever reason 3 months later haha”
“My decision log covers what was decided, by who, when/where. I may be involved in the decision or not, I may be told the reason for the decision or not. If someone wants to argue the topic again later, I'll point to "it was decided by VP so and so on x date - can you please align with him before reopening the topic". The reason for the decision doesn't always matter. Decided to change the colour of the outside wall to match our new marketing design, or customer preference, or s”
“You have to adjust the level of your explanations to the people you're taking with, and the context. If they're not technical, don't say technical things and stay high level. If the meeting is just a progress check, just say what you're working on, and any blocker you may have. But again, high level”
“Can I suggest that you're over complicating something that it isn't. All the information you need to have is a date, the decision and who made it. It sounds like you're missing context for yourself because at the end of the day it's the person who made the decision that needs to justify it and if anyone comes looking for a reason, as the PM all you need to do is just point to the person who made the decision, beyond that you're just creating an administration burden on yourse”
“I had an issue with my tech lead on a project and started documenting EVERYTHING. Things did come to a head and I used my logs to show what the actual problem was. The only way that's pertinent is another PM took this a step further and started printing up everything. Every email, he would type up all notes and print those up, then he had this HUGE 3 ring binder he put everything in and had it tabbed by date and then cross referenced. Whenever anyone started rehashing anything or said "”
“How detailed do you want to go? You could have a decision log on the decision and rationale, date, and who made the decision. But there was probably a lot of reasons behind why also. You can capture rationale but that might not say what marketing input was and what software input was and all their reasons for why it should be something different and why the final decision over ruled any other concerns. What I've done is capture decision and why and when someone wants to re-litigate everythin”
“Ultimately, it might be dictated by your management team. But, I would advocate for a rotating scrum master responsibility. Each person on the team takes the role for a couple of sprints at a time.”
“Six months ago we started building a codebase knowledge graph. The reason was simple, every time someone left or switched teams we lost all the context on why things were built the way they were. The code stays, the reasoning leaves with the person So we pointed an AI at our git history, PR descriptions, Coderabbit review comments and old Slack threads and let it connect decisions to code. Funny enough the review comments ended up being one of the best sources. Turns out most of the actual reaso”
“So many.... if you dont know what to ask you shouldnt go on that meeting alone. The most important stuff is asking what's included and SPECIFICALLY what's Not included. E.g. servers, maintenance, monthly credits and support etc. What's the project about in general? Platforms, cloud etc.”
“I'm researching how Production Support and SRE teams store operational knowledge. Things like: SOPS Runbooks Incident resolutions Troubleshooting guides Application documentation I'm curious: Where does your team store all of this today? What's the biggest frustration? How long does it usually take to find the right document during an incident? If you could change one thing about your current process, what would it be? submitted by /u/Agreeable-Boat-5615 [link] [com”
“I'm researching how Production Support and SRE teams store operational knowledge. Things like: SOPS Runbooks Incident resolutions Troubleshooting guides Application documentation I'm curious: Where does your team store all of this today? What's the biggest frustration? How long does it usually take to find the right document during an incident? If you could change one thing about your current process, what would it be? submitted by /u/Agreeable-Boat-5615 [link] [com”
“I'd separate two things the lag is currently blending together: the leading indicators you can actually get fast, and the costed actuals that legitimately take a week. You don't need the whole pipeline to be real-time - you need a tiny daily signal from the site (planned vs actual quantities placed, plus "anything that should be on site but isn't") that a foreman can send in two lines before end of day. That won't be reconciled to the penny, but it flags a schedule slip”
“I'd separate two things the lag is currently blending together: the leading indicators you can actually get fast, and the costed actuals that legitimately take a week. You don't need the whole pipeline to be real-time - you need a tiny daily signal from the site (planned vs actual quantities placed, plus "anything that should be on site but isn't") that a foreman can send in two lines before end of day. That won't be reconciled to the penny, but it flags a schedule slip”
“The no ramp thing matters less than whether anyone will actually argue about design with you. If the data team just treats you as the person who approves tickets, that gets miserable fast. I would ask for one example of a recent architecture disagreement before accepting.”
“If very team or company decides how they want to define them, effectively they become linguistic islands. Definitions vary: most don't include Time, others force sizes relative to one another (t-shirt, fibonacci, etc), almost none take into account who is performing the task... what a porridge of technobabel.”
“The shift you're describing is basically "action-only" vs "decision record" framing. A format that's helped me: state the decision, then one line each for (1) what you were optimizing for, (2) the alternative you didn't pick and why not, (3) the tradeoff you accepted. E.g. "Delayed launch 2 weeks. Optimizing for: avoiding brand damage from visible UI bugs at launch. Alternative: ship on time and patch after — rejected because first impressions are hard to und”
“That’s normal. You need to educate them on how that number is derived and how it’s simply a forecasted guide based on real data. My developers fixate on dates too. They forget it’s a forecasted, but they also don’t truly understand project management principles. The goal is to communicate data and educate your audience. This way they have information to make informed decisions and can’t claim they weren’t at least informed when they choose to ignore it. Try not to anticipate or fear reactions th”
“My job has our India team members work late, so I can catch them morning AZ time. Now getting Singapore, Brazil, and AZ on the same call is borderline impossible if Brazil won’t agree to a 9pm. I’ve resorted to delegating a POC in Brazil to run the call and record it. I own the agenda and follow up notes to ensure I’m staying in the loop.”
“I've managed distributed teams across North America, India, EMEA, and APJC, and one lesson I've learned is that you can't solve a 12+ hour time difference by working longer hours. You'll burn yourself out before you change the culture. Instead, I'd focus on creating predictable collaboration rhythms: Keep one recurring overlap meeting each week for cross-region discussions. Alternate the inconvenience. If North America has the early call this week, India gets the late call ne”
“I'm THE single project manager and a clinical research company. Our two divisions are operating out of North America and India. I live in Arizona, so Mountain Standard Time year round. Which means a 12.5 hour time difference to India Standard Time. The India Leads work a modified swing so there's some morning time NA overlap. The Technical Leads are all senior to me in grade. They're split about 50/50 between the two regions and have never talked to each other as one team. I'm tr”
“the fix isnt a better memory, its capturing the moment it happens instead of reconstructing it at month end. keep one running note (i keep a doc pinned on my phone) and drop a line the second something happens: the exact sentence a user said on a call, the number that moved, the thing that broke. 20 seconds each. then the monthly update is just editing, not remembering. "talked to users, working on churn" comes out generic because youre summarizing from vague memory. "a plumber on”
“yeah the float days threw off the whole rhythm tbh. the email reminder idea makes sense in theory but this particular stakeholder doesn't really engage with async updates, which is kind of the whole problem. if they did i'd have skipped the meeting entirely in the first place”
“Your second version works because it makes the judgment visible, not just the action. A useful structure: Context: what changed? Options: what did you compare? Decision: what did you choose? Rationale: which outcome mattered most? Next step: what will you monitor? Executive communication is less about sounding polished and more about showing how you weighed the tradeoffs.”
“Sounds almost as if a consultant got involved, they love inefficiency because $$. My company is around 800 employees with an IT team of 4 with 4 help desk. We need to be efficient. The IT director left, so the CEO decided they should make a fucking consultant bonehead the IT Director , I shit you not. He is in every meeting with hardly a clue what we are discussing. He is making all the top level decisions and telling us to do things where if you sat this POS down at a PC and told him to do any”
“I'm looking for advice on how small teams triage data-quality issues. We have a small startup, ~60 people. The data team is 1 data engineer and 2 data analysts. They have struggled to establish a consistent triaging process, saying the other side isnt doing enough to support. By way of example, here's today's incident involving a core operational system that is shared across the entire organization: DA discovered that report had stale data, traced the lineage back to the raw tables,”
“For example, my natural way of explaining a decision is something like this: "I postponed the launch by 2 weeks to address the remaining edge cases and polish user interface" But someone told me to say it like this: "I evaluated the impact of delaying vs shipping as is - but the potential brand damage outweighed the benefit of launching on time, so I decided to delay the launch by 2 weeks" How do I go from my natural way of explaining to the preferred way of explaining and co”
“Managing our engineering workflows across text-heavy async channels has slowed down delivery this quarter. With our core team on the US East Coast and offshore partners in very different time zones, critical issues can sit unresolved for hours. We're now considering software development in Latin America to enable more real-time collaboration, but entering a new region comes with compliance and hiring challenges. We've been looking at how companies like N-iX structure their nearshore deli”
“Our company has reached the point where it feels like we're spending more time talking about work than actually doing it. One day is planning meeting then project update, leadership sync, dependency review and on Friday we do retrospective. The frustrating part is that most of these meetings happen because people don't have visibility into what other teams are working on. Every meeting starts with someone asking for an update that already exists somewhere else. I'm wondering if visua”
“Are they only viewable from company hardware? Because I am pretty sure all screen recording measures can be circumvented by turning hardware acceleration off in the browsers and then screenshotting or recording via any number of methods.”
“What I found to work is capturing three things at the moment a decision gets made: what was decided, what alternatives were considered and why they lost, and what would have to change to reopen the discussion. The last one is particularly useful for rotating teams because it gives incoming members a way to quickly assess whether something is worth challenging or whether the original reasoning still holds. Location is also a very important part of this approach. Having a decision log is great, bu”
Do you mean sharing with competitors or sharing with sales/customers?
“I never cease to be amazed at the state of product management exposed by this sub.”
“My internal stakeholders know what I’m looking into well before the roadmap is official. I want people to call me out if I’m misunderstanding or missing something.”
“Like you’re trying to keep them from leaking to other people inside your company? Or outside the company? Why are you keeping your work secret from internal stakeholders?”
“Honestly, we have the exact same issues we had when we were all in a cube farm, sans the issues specific to working in a cube farm. Communication - easier to get in touch with people Documentation - just as easy/difficult Time zone overlap - core hours addresses that, like it does when you have a mix of early birds and later morning arrivals Onboarding - just as easy/difficult Maintaining engineering culture - just as easy/difficult. If maintaining your culture depends on where people are warmin”
“Honestly it's a hybrid mess. We have a product owner but she's basically checked out, so the devs go directly to stakeholders for requirements. I end up holding the timeline accountable with no real authority over scope changes. Change control exists on paper but nobody follows it, and when I push back I get the "we need to be agile about it" speech. Waterfall blame structure with none of the actual waterfall controls.”
“you're not wrong and i've been sitting with that i did drop the ball on documenting the scope changes formally and pushing back in real time instead of just absorbing them and hoping we'd figure it out i think i was so focused on keeping the client happy that i kept telling myself we could catch up later we couldn't. lesson learned the hard way on this one”
“exactly this. learned that the hard way. now every change request goes through me first, no exceptions once you let one slide the devs just assume that door is always open”
“This is really helpful, taking notes on all of it. The BLUF approach makes sense my instinct was to bury the bad news, which probably would have made it worse. We do have standups but honestly they've been pretty loose, more status updates than actual problem solving. That's on me. No senior dev lead, which is part of why things slipped as far as they did without me catching it sooner. The bells and whistles angle is probably my best play right now.”
“This is honestly where I dropped the ball. The scope change came in and I just absorbed it and kept moving without looping the client back in formally. Lesson learned the hard way. Going forward I'm treating any change as its own mini conversation with a paper trail, because verbal agreements clearly aren't cutting it when things go sideways later.”
“yeah that tracks what gets me is the PM takes all the heat from the client for something they had no hand in causing. accountability just kind of evaporates somewhere between the dev team and the deadline, and the person in the middle is left explaining a mess they didnt make”
“the MVP idea is something i keep going back and forth on because part of me worries it sets the expectation that the full thing is almost done when its really not but framing it as arming them for their own manager conversation is actually how i should be thinking about it, not just covering myself my instinct was to over explain the technical side and that was probably the wrong move”
“If you automate date recalculations too much, a single technician calling in sick for two days will trigger a waterfall effect that shifts fifty future deadlines, causing pure panic across multiple project teams. Sometimes, manual adjustments on a simple backlog queue are actually safer than letting a software engine auto-schedule your entire operation.”
“Our current process is basically reactive..like Scanner flags something and someone gets pulled off whatever they were doing, rebuilds the image, pushes it, waits for the next scan to confirm it's clean. Repeat next week when a new CVE lands in some package three layers deep that nobody remembers adding. i mean It works, technically but it's all manual triggers and manual verification, and it doesn't scale past a handful of images before someone's spending half their week just ba”
“Firstly this is not an email situation, this is a face to face meeting situation with the client and the relevant stakeholders because currently you have undocumented changes within your project which opens a number of issues for you as the allocated project manager. This is not about throwing people "under the bus" and you as the PM need to hold people to account and that includes you and the client as well. You need to educate both your own resources and the client that uncontrolled”
“I'm solely responsible for building my own roadmap. A new quarter rolls in, and they are asking "what items are you picking up in roadmap"”
“A side note but I would always deliver this kind of message by phone, with a follow up "as discussed" email.”
“All scope changes should warrant a heads-up email to the client right away. Something along the lines of "This is feasible but it will most likely add more time to our TAT due to X. Our new tentative ETA will be Y." A large part of the PM work is not only managing the projects, but also the expectations. If you clearly communicate this from the start, it's there, in writing, and it's on client, not you.”
“Give BLUF in the email first, be direct. Then take accountability on yourself for not managing expectations and development enough. Next, lay out what you plan to do about it. Are you having Scrum meetings with the Devs, say 3 times a week? Is there a Senior Dev Lead? Can they help? Does the Dev team have other tasking that can be pushed to the right? Are there any "bell and whistle" features that can be cut from the product, and wrapped in with an update later? Good luck”
“Hi, In my Experience, it's good to have documentation of all discussions. This can be as simple as notes from a call or our company uses Microsoft Copilot to Transcribe calls. This might be seen as "invasive" but I promise you, it's one of the best things that can happen to your Project Management Career. You have transcribed notes of who agreed to what action on what call and you can copy/paste them into an email to the client and ask them to let you know if any aspects are in”
“First of all, you as the PM (I’m assuming that you are, although you may be the Account manage) should take accountability, and communicate this. In this situation, the learning is, when you accept “scope changes” but don’t reflect potential impacts eg. Schedule, plus potentially devs well being due to over work , then I recommend that you raise and communicate the risk profile to Amber. The client may accept the extra risk and the cost of adding resources to achieve a deadline. But it should th”
“Inexperienced bosses choose inefficient measurements. Unfortunately that's the game.”
“Agreed! Additionally, really question is not how you would survive this but how you would make sure it doesn't happen again. Somebody, you or someone else who understand this perspective of the project must be part of the communication to recognize something like this at the right time. Proactiveness is the key here.”
“When things slip I always try to give a clear understanding of what happened (in this scope creep added additional release items, resulting in the additional days to the schedule), what the impact is (delay to release. I’d try, if you get a confident answer, to explain the new release) and what’s being done to prevent it going forward (are you working in any change approvals?). Most schedule releases, I find, tend to be arbitrary and this happens. You’re telling the person who likely needs to te”
“Especially true if uncharted territory. I was worried telling my sponsor that we’re a sprint or two behind due to unforeseen delays. He said, “well, you don’t know what you don’t know” and I was surprised to hear that. Hopefully OP’s client is equally agreeable but yes, this is part of the job. Also, OP, don’t let the team agree to things without you. You never signed off on those scope increases that “the team” agreed to so that’s on you for not owning those communications. If they happened beh”
“Unfortunately that’s pretty typical. I’ve found in my experience the dev team never really has to take responsibility when they miss deadlines. As long as they can hand waive it with “we found issues during testing”, or “the data took longer to load than expected” it just gets accepted and the PM delivers the news to the client”
“Problems scale with size and complexity of projects but it also comes back to the amount of project governance that is required to ensure contract integrity is maintained but you will find that most stress comes from the low cost and risk with a high volume type projects because there is less governance and variation to the triple constraint has more impact. A smaller project has the higher probability of running off the rails than a large complex project because of the governance overlay that i”
“If the roadmap is truly at the high strategic level, and outcomes based, it shouldn't be changing by the minute. Sure, feature priorities may change, but if you've built a roadmap correctly in the first place, what you're saying rarely happens in the real world. At least I don't know of any company who's product strategy changes every afternoon.”