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It was a delight, as always, to join Lily Smith and Randy Silver on The Product Experience, Mind the Product's long-running podcast, to talk about The Decision Stack.
If you haven't picked up your own copy of The Decision Stack yet, get the book on Amazon, Barnes&Noble, Waterstones, or other great book stores.
Key Takeaways from the Podcast
Strategy is the foundation — and it's usually missing. Research cited in the book shows that 95% of employees cannot name their organisation's strategy. Exec teams compound the problem by avoiding the hard choices that real strategy requires, because real strategy means picking winners and losers.
The stack answers five questions. Where are we going? How are we going to get there? What is important right now and how do we measure progress? What actions are we going to take? And how do we choose between them? The tools — vision, strategy, OKRs, opportunities, principles — matter less than whether those questions are genuinely answered and connected.
Empowerment without context is abandonment. Teams given autonomy but no strategic clarity don't make better decisions — they scatter. The decision stack exists to give direction to empowerment, so people know which direction to run before they're given the freedom to run.
Strategy drifts if you don't maintain it. As markets shift, new people join, and AI changes assumptions overnight, the risk isn't that a strategy was wrong at the outset — it's that no one updated it. Martin recommends at minimum a quarterly check-in, even for organisations with a five-year strategy.
Principles eliminate recurring debates. When Monster's CEO declared that building the best experience for job seekers would always come first, the weeks-long internal debate about recruiter versus job seeker priority disappeared overnight. Principles are the tool that makes the right decision obvious — without a meeting.
Communication is never a one-off. A twenty-slide strategy deck shared once at an all-hands is not communication — it's an announcement. Martin references Jeff Weiner's maxim: by the time you're sick of saying something, people are just beginning to hear it. The stack has to live inside existing ceremonies, not sit in a document no one revisits.
Start where you are, not from scratch. The most common mistake is treating the stack as a reason to tear everything down and rebuild from a blank canvas. For most organisations, the better approach is diagnostic — audit what exists, find the connections that are broken or missing, and start there.
