Decisions

I have recently read two articles on "Decisions Fatigue": one was published in NY Times, the other one - in this blog post. This got me thinking - do development managers and team leaders suffer from such decision fatigue as well ?

It seems that in many cases, the management level that directly manages software engineers takes much more decisions than necessary, going into much more details, and do not empower enough the individual engineers to take more decisions, and also be accountable for the results of these decisions.

I am sure that those engineers who are willing to step up, indeed do so and take many decisions themselves (such as described in the 2nd post), when properly empowered by their managers. But what about those that do not do so ? They seem to be in a very convenient position, where their manager does most of the decisions, and then also faces all the consequences in case of a failure, while they are at most the "innocent bystanders".

Now, in real life, the vast majority of these people are able to take a lot of very important decisions: organizing their wedding, buying a new apartment, taking care of their children and elders, etc. All these decisions seem to be much more difficult than some decisions on design, user experience, quality, priorities or any other decisions that a software engineer might need to take in the day-to-day work.
So what is different ? Well, in real life there is no manager to take the decision instead, the person needs to take these decisions and be accountable for the results.

Now, someone would ask: what do we need the managers for then ? Why do we, the developers, need to take all the responsibility, where is the responsibility of the manager ?
Well, the responsibility of the managers is to determine which decisions can be taken directly by the people they manage, help these people by teaching them and providing them the tools to make such decisions, and setting the standards and expectations for these decisions and their outcome. Eventually, the managers are accountable for any outcome of the work done by the people they manage (both for failures and for success), but the point here is that each and every individual should be equally accountable as well for their work.

Now, what does it all have to do with decision fatigue ? Same as discussed regarding the engineers' decision fatigue in the 2nd blog post, a manager also can process only a limited amount of input every day, and take a limited amount of decisions.
The results of such decision fatigue can be truly devastating for the product:

• Setting incorrect priorities
• Settling for the "quick-and-dirty" solutions just so as to remove the problem from the pile of unresolved issues, instead of making sure that there is an adequate design
• Not creating a long-term strategy for the product
• Developing features that have bad user experience, only because we didn't put more effort into designing their usability better
• Taking technical decisions that result in bad performance and scale problems later on
• Taking decisions that do not address well enough some people's aspirations for personal development, etc...

If more decisions were taken directly by the engineers, the managers would have more mental capacity for taking the more strategic decisions, that have more effect in the long-term, and in fact do more of the decisions that they were so far pushed up to their managers or aside to the product manager/owner or the product architects.

From my experience in implementing these principles so far, I can say that it worked better in some cases and worth in other. Here are some of the pitfalls to avoid:

• The engineers are provided with too much decision freedom, and as a result decisions are taken in a counter-productive direction (focusing on things that are not important, etc...).
• Need to identify cases when the engineers do not have the tools to reach the decision on their own, and they do need extra guidance. Otherwise, the process can come to a hold due to no one taking a decision.
• In order to take decisions, the engineers need to have sufficient information. The managers must be an "information hub" in this sense - pushing the relevant information to the relevant individuals.
• Sometimes the outcome of the decision has a very meaningful impact and the engineers do not feel comfortable taking such a decision on their own.

To sum it all up, I do believe that following the above principles, when implemented properly, will benefit both  the software engineers and their managers, by extending the scope of their day-to-day work, providing more  freedom to their work process, and enabling everyone to take better decisions where it really matters.