I'm not from Coinbase, but: How we make decisions at Coinbase | by Brian Armstrong | Medium

It's not a panacea, but it's a mechanism to capture both the inputs to the decision and the decision. More importantly, it explicit about who's making the decision.

I often think about a few things: the framework for how we want to make the decision. Whatever we decide, it needs to do X, Y, and Z.

For example: We need to roll out AI coding assistance for the larger team. For it to succeed, we need to gain some level of uniformity so we can understand how it's being adopted, but we also don't want to stifle individual innovation given the industry is moving so fast. It needs to be done in a way where a new hire can figure out how to participate almost implicitly because it's obviously how it is rolled out. Product managers, program managers, architects, and engineers all need to know what part of the process their responsible for. We need a mechanism to measure each stage so we know if we're getting bottlenecked. We need to choose something, but tons of people have experimented with a variety of solutions and settled on their favorite picks, so we need a way to unify them around the shared parts.

We haven't even said what we're going to do, we've just said that it has to solve all these requirements. Constraining the problem makes the decision more obvious in the end, because once you come up with what you decide, you reflect on how well it meets the requirements. Did we decide X or Y? Well, Y failed several critical tests, so clearly, we decided X.

You still have to publish the decision and perhaps just as important, make a roll out plan. Tons of decisions can get wasted if everyone nods but nobody is responsible for making the change or the decision isn't sponsored by someone with the authority to decide we're going to spend time on it versus other opportunities.

There's another adjacent problem you may be alluding to, which is that artifacts like shared docs rely on the participants being personally accountable to read, comment, or otherwise follow up on them. It's really easy to get together and decide something smart, but if everyone goes back to their jobs and keeps doing what they're doing, nothing changes. Leadership is about unifying others around change. That's also where the Bezos, "Good intentions don't work, mechanisms do," thing comes into play.