It's not hard to make decisions when you know what your principles are
<aside> 🗒️ We didn’t invent this ourselves, we were inspired by https://vimeo.com/735734406.
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Building a business and a product means we have to make decisions constantly. Sometimes, that can really feel overwhelming leading to decision overload. Additionally, there is something called the “Paradox of choice”. It stipulates that while we might believe that being presented with multiple options actually makes it easier to choose one that we are happy with, having an abundance of options actually requires more effort to make a decision and can leave us feeling unsatisfied with our choice (the more options you have, the more trade-offs there are).
While we can all understand that making decisions is hard, making product decisions is arguably even more difficult due to the “Paradox of autonomy”. We want our teams to be empowered to make decisions or as Steve Jobs said it:
“It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”
On the other hand, unfeathered autonomy can lead to chaos and people going in multiple directions which is what we want to avoid. While we want to encourage empowered teams that have autonomy, we also want to make sure teams can work in a context where there is alignment and give them a clear direction.
How can we create alignment? Leadership can do that by creating a strategic context (Martin calls this the “Decision Stack”). Such a framework helps the business answer the question “How are we doing this?” while it allows individual contributors to answer the “Why are we doing this?”.
The Vision, Strategy, and objectives are out of scope for this page so let’s zoom in on our product principles.
This is tightly coupled to our mission, we want to make care flows work harder than care teams. We believe by putting care teams first we cannot only help them deliver better care more efficiently but we can also contribute to reducing burnout and staff shortages. Our approach is not just about streamlining processes; it's about nurturing the human element at the heart of healthcare.
Yet, at the end of the chain, there is a patient receiving care. We take this seriously, not only because it’s morally the right thing to do but also because that’s what the care teams care about. Any lapse in the delivery of care can have irrecoverable consequences, a reality we deeply acknowledge. Thus, our philosophy of prioritizing care teams is instrumental in enabling them to devote their best to patients.
By putting care teams first, we enhance their capacity to place patients at the forefront of all they do.
Think of building your product as walking through an open land dotted with small hills and towering mountains. When you climb each small hill, you gain a new perspective, which lets you make new and better decisions because you’re able to survey the land. If you attempt to summit Everest, you risk spending a great deal of time scaling it only to realize it’s not the right perspective and that you’d have been better off climbing many smaller hills.
At Awell, we have a vision to become the leading CareOps platform used by care teams worldwide to drive continuous improvement in care delivery. Presuming we know all the steps to deliver on that vision and how to sequence them would be nothing more than a lie. Any second we spend on trying to plan for it is a second we don’t spend doing.