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by specialist 3642 days ago
"decisions for the product are made by consensus of the team"

I favor democratic decision making processes.

Use voting systems appropriate for the task. Roman eval for new hires, go/no go. Approval voting for triage, new features. JADs for "visions". Creative writing exercise for post-mortems. Etc.

"Democratic" does not mean winner-takes-all, which is suboptimal.

"Democratic" does not mean consensus.

1 comments

"Use voting systems appropriate for the task. "

I rather don't agree with this one.

'Voting' should almost never, ever be used.

For so many reasons.

Rarely should everyone have an 'equal say'. You are not 'equal citizens' in this. Second - is that it leads to politics - 'I helped you last time, you help me this time' etc. Unless you get into crazy things like 'hidden ballots'.

There is no substitute for leadership.

Often, a mediocre decision, executed upon well, will lead to better outcomes than 'great decisions' wherein their is fudging, lack of insight etc..

In situations that require broad input, a decent moderator should be able to assess the 'consensus' and go with that.

In many design situations, architects and designers should basically set the direction, absent issues brought up by team members.

Things like 'should we all use the same IDE' or 'what IDE's can we use' - obviously require a lot of input from team members and maximum flexibility.

But things like API design ... that needs to be really well curated and it's best left to the experts - with strong feedback from team members.

Who decides who are the experts, and who checks their work?
>There is no substitute for leadership.

Second this, true in my experience as well.

The word you're looking for is neoreactionary.