One of the highest-leverage skills you can develop as an engineering manager is designing your decisions to be reversible.

Most managers waste enormous amounts of time trying to make “perfect” decisions on questions that don’t require perfection. They over-research, over-debate, and create analysis paralysis in their teams.

The secret: categorize every decision as either one-way or two-way doors.

One-way doors vs Two-way doors

One-way doors are hard or impossible to reverse. Examples:

• Choosing your core database technology
• Hiring or firing decisions
• Committing to a major customer contract
• Selecting your primary programming language

These deserve careful analysis, broad input, and slow deliberation.

Two-way doors are easily reversible. Examples:

• Team meeting schedules
• Documentation formats
• Most process changes
• Initial service architecture choices (with proper abstractions)

These should be decided quickly with 70% of the information you’d like to have.

The Practice

Before making any decision, ask: “How hard would it be to reverse this?”

If it’s reversible:

1. Make the call quickly
2. Set a review date (1-3 months out)
3. Document what success looks like
4. Move forward with conviction
5. Adjust based on data, not opinions

If it’s irreversible:

1. Slow down appropriately
2. Gather diverse perspectives
3. Think second-order effects
4. Make the decision, then commit fully

Why This Works

This approach gives you:

• Speed: Your team moves 3-5x faster on 80% of decisions
• Learning: You gather real-world data instead of theoretical debates
• Culture: You model bias-to-action and data-driven iteration
• Energy: You save cognitive resources for decisions that truly matter

The best engineering organizations aren’t those that make perfect decisions. They’re the ones that make good-enough decisions quickly, learn from them rapidly, and course-correct effectively.

Start today: identify one decision you’re overthinking. If it’s a two-way door, make the call by end of day.