👋 Howdy, Erik here. Welcome to the 7th edition of Early Product Pitfalls. Each week I bring founding startup teams ⏳ 2-3 minutes on a not-so-obvious pitfall when building new things.

🕳The pit

Making big decisions without documenting how and why you made them.

🤖 What you might sound like

Ship it. What’s next?

Why did we decide to do that again?

👀 You, knowing better …

You pull up your Decision Log Template, and like a pilot landing a plane, you work through complexity one step at a time.

You think about just how many decisions you make in a day and accept that you’ll eventually forget why you did this or that. While this is mostly ok, you acknowledge that certain decisions will be important to revist. In the future, you will want to apply consistent logic and improve your decision making process.

Most importantly, you square up to the fact that making big decisions with incomplete information is hard to do in your head. Are you asking the right questions? Are you foreseeing all of the downstream effects? Who else needs to weigh in? You write it all down, gather inputs, and move forward with confidence.

🎁 Example

For this edition, I thought I would offer up a Decision Log entry that I used to decide on my consulting practice’s first growth channel.

If you’re reading this, you know where I landed 😉. But I encourage you to check out my thought process here.

🔦 Light for the dark

Pressure is a privilege.

Billie Jean King

Have a great week everyone.

Erik