**Topics::** [[Decision Making]] [[Risk Management]] ![[uturn.jpg]] ## Ensure that analysis effort leads to better or faster decisions One thing I always encourage data people to do is to determine exactly how analysis effort will lead to a better or faster decision: - One trick can be as simple as plotting out (with your stakeholder) what action would be taken as a result of the analysis. - Another is thinking about decision reversibility, especially in startups where your analysis bandwidth is necessarily limited and precious. ## Highly reversible decisions don’t require a lot of pre-decision analysis The amount of time spent doing pre-decision data analysis on a decision should be inversely proportional to the reversibility of that decision. It’s more beneficial to do an analysis for launching a new market (very hard to "unlaunch" a market) than changing copy of a website (just throw some ideas and see what sticks using some experimentation). I find that I save people a lot of time on highly reversible decisions by just telling them to launch and iterate instead of spending tons of time digging into event logs and user behavior, and as a bonus, I get to spend my analysis bandwidth on less reversible, and therefore more consequential, decisions.