Make better decisions with fewer online meetings

[bjuly]

Hi! I am the cofounder TopAgree. We have created TopAgree to help teams make faster decisions with fewer meetings. My friend Linus and I are developing it together because we often don't make the important decisions until the last five minutes of a meeting. And then, unfortunately, we often make the wrong decisions. I have a big request for you: Please comment when you like to test the product and give us feedback. Thanks so much! Kind regards, Bastian

[dang]

This is not a valid Show HN. Please read the rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html.

I've taken "Show HN" out of the title now.

[l7l]

Thanks, sorry!

[wcarss]

A feature suggestion: a way to list specific possible outcomes, and have pros/cons/questions/votes relate to them.

In the "We will open a new office in Amsterdam" example, it's expressed as just a yes/no situation, but [e-mail] is seen asking a question which is really an alternate potential outcome. It seems like a whole separate "decision" would need to be made for that, with its own pros/cons/questions, which would be very clunky compared to having that alternative discussed in the same place.

A different instance of something similar came up for me recently. I lead a small team and a member of the team is temporarily in a far flung timezone. We normally have a team meeting at a specific time which is very inconvenient in this far timezone, but moving to any convenient time would inconvenience the rest of the team. I considered a few options and ran a small poll, proposed a new meeting time for some of the meetings, and everyone on the team hated the idea, so we fell back to having it at its normal time.

I think a tool like this could have been very helpful for listing out 3-4 possible options and allowing people to express specific pros/cons for each of those. We might have ended up at a more optimal situation, but instead we ended up with the one that was simplest to express, discuss, and agree on.

All that said: even with that feature, I am not sure I would pay for this tool. I feel like the friction of introducing "a tool" for things like this, with accounts and signups and seats and process and payments -- it just isn't worth it for the pain it would solve for me. I feel the pain, but I'm not convinced I should pay someone to fix it, or that doing so would really make things better. I also feel (as a shitty developer customer would) that I could build this or something that gets me 60% of the way there for free, or accomplish it via existing mechanisms in slack/the team wiki, where my team already lives.

(but, don't listen to me -- prove me wrong!)

[l7l]

Hi wcarss, thanks a lot for your great comment and input! We are already working on alternative decisions, but we need to do lots of improvements to keep it easy. Your willingness to pay sounds reasonable for your use case, we haven't decided on a business model yet. Best wishes

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Really, you are talking about CBDM (Consensus-Based Decision-Making). That's something that I actually did a presentation on, years ago (a well-known soporific that puts many to sleep).

I like this idea, and I haven't studied the system enough to know how it works, but it will need to come up with a "framework," where action items are derived from proposals or motions. I guess that using the system would mean agreeing to use their framework. Maybe they can have a menu of different frameworks, but each org would need to adopt a framework.

[sebhook]

I agree, this feels like it could be built as a feature of Asana instead of a separate tool.

[maliker]

I think you're working on a super important problem. Having moved from a software company to a political organization, this kind of thing drives me crazy. Used to be hey, what's the most critical issue and who's working on it and what's the latest status: oh easy just check the company-wide bug database. Now in a politics org: first track down 15 vague email threads, go to 3 different meetings which are 90% chitchat, get yelled at for not working on some other thing that's deemed higher priority. Making serious workflow management palatable to non-software organizations would be a huge win.

[l7l]

Hi maliker, thanks for your valuable input. Funnily enough we had political orgs. on our list of early adopters. We specially want to replace that digging through emails to reverse engineer decisions part.

[codingdave]

It is an interesting idea - you definitely have hit on a problem area. I don't think you have the correct solution. But that isn't a bad thing -- I think the process of launching this, and listening to feedback will allow you to find the correct solution. As long as you adapt to the feedback and don't come into it with ego, it should be an interesting journey.

[bjuly]

Hi codingdave, what feedback would you have? And how would you change our solution?

[codingdave]

- Making a decision at the last 5 minutes of a meeting is fine - if you make it earlier, the meeting was too long. But it has to be the right decision. You don't need to fight meetings - you need to fight bad decisions within meetings.

- Getting all the info and feedback and allowing time for all stakeholders to vote can drive a culture of decisions by committee - while this does allow for great collaboration and engagement, it also can be slower than desired, and does not allow a visionary leader to really drive his organization. It also can make people who truly are experts in a field feel dismissed because now everyone is held on equal footing and their expertise is devalued. At the end of the day, people lower in the org chart will love it, execs will not. And without exec support, it won't become integrated into the org.

Your idea of bringing asynch discussions and decision-making is on-target. But I think you have under-estimated what drives people at different levels of an organization, and this level of transparency and collaboration is not what everyone will want.

In all honesty, I don't know how I would change the solution. I know that you need to continue to feed the ego of leaders and experts, while allowing contributions from everyone else, too. You have to balance different audiences with divergent personalities, and let the leaders lead, without the app feeling like lip service to non-leaders. In short, I don't think your solution is bad - I just think you'll find that it will take a ton of effort, listening, and understanding to be sure all participants truly feel the benefit of the product and there is no way to hit that mark on the first try.

[xpe]

Well said. I've looked at a lot of products/services in this vein, and many are aspirational / idealistic. You'll want to brace yourselves for the not-so-pleasant realities like the comment above mentions: egos, status, etc.

I indeed like to see clean decision-making based on effective patterns. The challenge often comes down to handling people that don't play along. :) Maybe the "clean" solution isn't realistic. Maybe the people are in a hurry. Or don't really pay much attention. If only people would behave themselves! :P

Maybe the usual textbook "decision making process" is only descriptive in the sense that it attaches a label to certain activities. The textbook models often pretend to be linear and unconnected to other simultaneous decisions.

P.S. Agenda-setting as an operational leader is both hard and arguably essential. I distinguish "operational" leadership from "motivational" leadership, conceptually, even though they are often blended into a person or role.

[l7l]

Hi codingdave, great input, thanks a lot! We are really early in this journey and excited to learn and put all the pieces together.

[awkwardengineer]

highly recommend a few books if you haven't read them yet. plenty of of ideas to steal from there:

from "Decisive: How to make better choices in life and work" https://www.amazon.com/Decisive-Make-Better-Choices-Life/dp/..., you might be presenting a false choice at the top. Is there a feature to prompt people to propose alternative paths?

from "How to Decide" https://www.amazon.com/How-Decide-Simple-Making-Choices/dp/0..., can you add a feature to list options and assign probability and cost weightings? (essentially risk/probability/impact scoring)

[synu]

I built something similar. It didn’t really work as a business (or at least I wasn’t able to make it work) so I open sourced it: https://github.com/async-go/asyncgo

If there’s anything useful there feel free to scavenge, or if you’d like to talk about what I learned trying to build it let me know.

[SoftTalker]

I remember a similar web app from 5 or 6 years ago or so, I thought maybe it was called "Decide Already" but decidealready.com doesn't seem to be it, at least not anymore.

[l7l]

Hi synu! Thanks for your comment! Very interesting! Would be great to have a chat! Best wishes, Linus

[synu]

My contact info is in my profile.

[curious_cat_163]

Good idea. Two things:

1. Usually, there is a larger context to decisions. Have you considered integrations around tying these decisions to frameworks like OKRs?

2. Usually, decisions require some form of execution. Execution also makes decision matter. People within an org should feel like not only they were heard, but when the final decision was taken by its owner, there was some form of action taken as a follow up. Sometimes the follow up would be merging some code in a git branch. Sometimes the follow up would be calling a lawyer and discussing long-term consequences. In any event, people should be able to see that something happened as a result of their input, within your UI. :)

[soco]

I like the idea a lot. However, putting my company data - contacts info included - in some cloud makes me uncomfortable, so please comment or add somewhere information about how you (plan to) solve things like security and privacy.

[l7l]

Hi soco, great point! We think about encryption a lot as on-prem doesn‘t make too much sense. Would that work for you?

[soco]

But I would still need to register using my work address - thus sharing it with an external service. That could still be acceptable (depending on contractual guarantees). Your cloud service will then send emails to internal users, thus it's me sharing outside the company the 1. contact addresses (which did or did not agree to above contract) and 2. email contents (up to users what they put inside). Hmm, not ideal. A MS Teams app, if you ever thought about one, would be able to use the user's own MS Graph for storage and for the contacts info, thus completely independent of external servers.

[l7l]

Great points. Didn't know about Teams apps, going to look into it. Cool!

[andix]

Does it integrate into MS Teams? Or some other established enterprise platform?

Otherwise it’s really hard to introduce it to a corporation, where it’s probably most needed.

[westurner]

Webhook integrations: Slack/Mattermost; Zulip; Zapier Platform; GitHub Pull Requests

Another issue/checkbox:

Re: collaboration engineering, Thinklets: "No Kings: How Do You Make Good Decisions Efficiently in a Flat Organization?" (2019) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20157064

[bjuly]

Thank you westurner for the link. Super helpful. Kind regards, Bastian

[westurner]

Great idea. IMHO, Feedback is necessary for #EvidenceBasedPolicy; for objective progress.

Evidence-based policy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence-based_policy (Jupyter, scikit-learn & Yellowbrick, Kaggle,)

Town hall meeting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_hall_meeting

awesome-ideation-tools: https://github.com/zazaalaza/awesome-ideation-tools :

> Awesome collection of brainstorming, problem solving, ideation and team building tools. From foresight to overcoming creative blocks, this list contains all the awesome boardgames, canvases and deck of cards that were designed to help you solve a certian problem.

[bjuly]

Thank you for your questions andix! We are thinking about MS Teams integration. Depends on user feedback.

[akrolsmir]

Hey! I like the idea of this a lot; oftentimes in team standups, I feel our discussions would benefit from a clear issue owner, as well as the space for others to give feedback.

I might suggest trying other more granular voting systems instead of just up/down voting: 5-star voting, set number of points, or my personal favorite: prediction markets! A prediction market makes participants calibrate how much they believe in a particular choice, and also makes a clear ledger so everyone can get a sense of how often they have been correct in the past.

Here's one example of a market we set up for informing an important decision (which database our site would use): https://manifold.markets/Austin/what-database-will-manifold-...

[l7l]

Hi akrolsmir, thanks for your feedback! That's a really interesting concept, thanks for sharing!

[jitl]

We’ve found decision logs and our structured “RFC” process quite useful at Notion. The extra structure from a dedicated SaaS for this could be helpful. But to me the Pro/Con voting system seems like it’ll work only for Go/NoGo binary choices. What about selecting the best option from a suite of candidates?

[sankumsek]

Do you have any details on your decision log? I'm curious what details you add to it. I guess it'd have fields like date, decision made, options considered, and who approved the decision.

[jrib]

I was actually looking for good alternatives today and came across a few good resources:

* https://microsoft.github.io/code-with-engineering-playbook/d...

* https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/architecture-decision...

* https://adr.github.io/

[l7l]

Hi jitl! We are working on alternative decision proposals. But it ads a lot of complexity and people would need to come back to review those a lot. Thanks for the input!

[igetspam]

How does one get access? I've written CAB processes for this in the past and I'm not sure doing it robotically will be an improvement in that but I'd be happy to take a look. I just put my email on the early access list.

[bjuly]

Thank you igetspam! We will contact you asap. Change-advisory boards is what we had in mind when we separated between expert input and decision making. We create the agenda for a meeting robotically only if the decision makers cannot agree asynchronically. Looking forward to exchanging thoughts with you!

[tpoacher]

The best meeting tool I've ever seen is the John Cleese video "meetings bloody meetings".

Find a way to include all five summary points at the end of that video into your product, and you'll have a winner.

Right now I see you only addressing one of them, maaaybe two.

[l7l]

Hi HN family

I’m Linus, the other founder of TopAgree. We’re super excited to launch our beta today!

Why we built TopAgree Like many of you, we had lots of daily meetings. But with us, there rarely was a clear meeting agenda, or it was not followed, or even if so, someone was not prepared to make a decision. It often was a mix of private chat followed by opinionated discussions, ending in bad last-minute compromise decisions that were not actionable.

So we went on a journey to talk to experts and heavy users to find out if they figured out what we failed at. This is what we have learned about remarkable decision-making: - Providing relevant background and reason - Diverging - independent collection of alternative decisions and ideas - Converging - weighting ideas and choosing the best - Have a clear decision that is actionable

How TopAgree can help you? Automated process: TopAgree nudges all stakeholders so that you meet your deadlines Decision cockpit: All the information you need to decide in one place Decision log: Easily access all previous decisions

TL;DR: If you want to have faster and better decisions, get early access to TopAgree!

We are super excited to hear what you think!

Best wishes

[pvg]

Your page says

"Join the waitlist and get access soon."

A Show HN needs to be something users can try when it's posted:

Off topic: blog posts, sign-up pages, newsletters, lists, and other reading material. Those can't be tried out, so can't be Show HNs. Make a regular submission instead. [...]

Please make it easy for users to try your thing out, ideally without barriers such as signups or emails. You'll get more feedback that way.

If your work isn't ready for users to try out, please don't do a Show HN. Once it's ready, come back and do it then. Don't post landing pages or fundraisers.

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

[l7l]

Hi pvg! Thanks for your message, I wasn‘t aware of that.

[pvg]

You can edit the title to take the 'show hn' off although a mod will come along to do it for you at some point.

[elefantastisch]

Are you worried that you're trying to solve a process/people/culture problem with a technology solution?

[bjuly]

Good point, elefantastisch. Culture is a huge success driver. We think it is also about repeat, repeat and repeat the right things to achieve a great culture. And technology can help people not to forget to repeat. What do you think?

[l7l]

Hi elefantastisch, could not be worried more. But we want to solve it for us and hopefully some others :)

[yoyopa]

this is absurd. you can't boil everything down to a simple statement and upvotes/downvotes. irl, it's also very important to avoid paper trails and be able to deny things and forget things.

[playingalong]

A side comment:

I think you don't stand a chance to have a substantial customer base in Scandinavia. Their decision making process is by iterative consensus. You hold the meetings on the topic until there is a collective agreement for unanimous decision. If there is not, you hold another meeting in a few days.

[bjuly]

Sounds better than what we do in Germany: one meeting after the other and no decision!

[guytv]

This is intriguing.

Doesn't the CEO / Project lead / DRI at some point just makes a decision and whoever does not agree have to "disagree and commit"?

[playingalong]

There are several tricks to get to a decision. E.g. you can make sure the next meeting includes a narrower group.

[soco]

Or you enjoy meeting each other too much.

[curious_cat_163]

That sounds like a consensus algorithm.