The Uliasti Guide to Making Decisions

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A company is, at its core, two things: people and decisions. Everything else is implementation.

How well a company performs over time is largely determined by how decisions are made, by whom, and with what level of clarity and responsibility.

This guide outlines how we think about decisions at Uliasti. Not as rigid rules, but as shared principles we return to again and again.
Decision-making is not a one-off event. It is daily work.

Principles, not prescriptions
What follows is a collection of questions and mental frames we use when navigating decisions. This is not a checklist. We do not run through all of these every time. But they help us slow down when needed, speed up when appropriate, and align when stakes are high.
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They exist to support the one activity that defines leadership, product work, and execution alike: deciding well.

Questions we ask ourselves
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Clarity and necessity‍

• Why are we deciding this now?
• Does this decision actually need to be made?
• What happens if we don’t decide at all?
• Why hasn’t this already been decided?

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Ownership and responsibility

• ‍‍Is the right person making this decision?
• Not the right role, but the right individual with context and accountability.
• Who is deciding, and who is merely advising?
• Are too many people involved in something one person should own?
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‍Time and perspective

• ‍‍How will this decision feel in a year?
• Would we decide differently if we waited until tomorrow morning
• Where would we be today if we had made this decision 90 days ago?

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Scope and reversibility

• ‍‍Can we make this decision smaller?Can one big decision be split into two or three simpler ones?How reversible is it, really?
• Can one big decision be split into two or three simpler ones?
• How reversible is it, really?
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‍Signals and hesitation

• ‍‍What is slowing us down?
• What are we afraid of?
• What does the hesitation reveal?

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‍Alternatives and trade-offs

• ‍‍Why would someone reasonable choose a different path?
• What gets easier if we decide this way?
• What gets harder?
• Is the short-term easy becoming long-term hard, or the other way around?

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‍Instinct, data, and experience

• ‍‍What was our first instinct?
• Are we now trying to justify it with selective data?
• Is this primarily a data-driven decision or an intuition-driven one?
• What happened the last time we faced something similar?‍

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‍Impact

• ‍‍Who does this decision affect?
• Does it create more work or remove work?
• Does it help customers more than it helps us, or vice versa?
• Will the consequences be obvious, or only visible under a microscope?

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‍Effort and return

• ‍‍Is the return on effort worth it?
• Will this eliminate future decisions or create new ones?
• Is this something a less senior person could decide and learn from?‍

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Principles and integrity

• ‍‍Which principles are we reinforcing?
• Which principles are we bending?
• In the end, is this actually about money?

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‍Commitment

• ‍‍When do we have to decide?
• Is this a one-time decision or a repeating one?
• How and when will we know whether it mattered?
• And sometimes, the simplest question: Do I even care which way this goes? If not, why am I involved?

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Anything else?

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We hope this guide was useful. It reflects how we think today, but it’s not meant to be final.

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What questions are still open?
What did you expect to find but didn’t?
What clarified your thinking, and what didn’t?

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This is a living document. We’ll refine it as we learn, build, and make better decisions ourselves.

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If you have thoughts, feedback, or questions, we’d genuinely like to hear them. Reach out directly to the author, Dejan Georgiev at: dejan.georgiev@uliasti.com

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