Source: Tom Summer
Published: June 2022

When Making a Decision, Share the Why

Tom Sommer is the Director of Engineering at Redbubble—a marketplace for print-on-demand products. He believes that the steps to make a good decision include:

Step 1: Be clear about the desired outcome; aim for a single, well-articulated outcome.

Step 2: Identify potential solutions and the trade-offs between them.

Step 3: Communicate the decision to get buy-in. Share the “why.”

EXAMPLE
Redbubble needs to hire 10 software engineers. The recruiting team was overwhelmed with their workload to source, arrange interviews, and onboard new employees.

Step 1: The outcome we seek is to lower the administrative overhead for our recruiting team.

Step 2: The potential solutions are a pooling strategy versus individual roles. The benefit of pooling is that you list one job description, “software engineer,” which simplifies arranging interviews. The downside, compared to individual roles, is that it is unclear during the process which team a candidate might join.

Step 3: Let hiring managers and recruiters know that “We’re trying to lower the administrative load on our team, so we’re moving to a pooling approach for software engineering candidates.”

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