Major new release: Make values-based decisions with Decision Criteria
Evolving Condorsay into a Decision Operating System
Summary: We’re shipping a major update to Condorsay that allows you to use multiple criteria in decisions, using a research-backed method called Analytic Hierarchy Process.
Decisions are complex and multi-dimensional beasts that often require more effort to tackle than simply ranking a list. Understanding which values drive our decisions can be as important as ranking the options themselves, and having a shared understanding of each person’s decision criteria is vital. When buying a car with a significant other, for example, knowing that your partner weighs “cost” more heavily than “style” is likely to be much more useful than simply knowing which model they like.
For the past few months, we’ve been working hard to evolve Condorsay into a Decision Operating System capable of handling complex, multi-dimensional decisions for groups. Today, we’re proud to announce Decision Criteria, a new and foundational feature that embeds structured values into every decision your team makes.
The problem of navigating complex decisions in a structured way is known as Multiple-criteria decision analysis. We wrote recently about how NASA used a well-researched approach from this discipline, Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), to select a life support system for a manned mission to Mars. We’ve spent the past few months evolving our platform to support AHP in an easy, intuitive, and powerful way, and we can’t wait to show you what we’ve been working on.
Starting today, our in-line decision editor will accept a new format that allows anyone to easily and intuitively craft complex, multi-dimensional decisions by specifying goals, criteria, and options in a nested list, like:
Goal: Select a car for the family
Criteria
Safety
Style
Cost
Purchase cost
Fuel cost
Comfort
Options
Honda Civic
Honda CRV
Mercedes S Class
In decisions with both criteria and options, respondents to Condorsay’s paired-comparison surveys prioritize criteria and subcriteria against one another (“is cost or safety more important?”) and options against criteria (“is a Honda CRV or a Mercedes S Class most preferable from a safety perspective?”). In the same tap, they’ll also be asked to select a star rating to indicate their level of intensity. (We also added ranking intensity to this release!)
To simply rank a list without criteria, all you have to do is delete the criteria block from the list:
Goal: Select a car for the family
Options
Honda Civic
Honda CRV
Mercedes S Class
Results for each decision will now weigh both criteria and options to produce a ranked list that reflects the group’s preferences on the overall tradeoffs. In the example I created below for headcount planning, you can see the weights for the top two rated options, and how they fared against many criteria:
In this case, Engineer is the most highly weighted option, and we’re able to see why: it’s a top option for many highly rated criteria, including the ability to ship things quickly and implement customer feedback. As the most expensive position to hire for, it’s a bottom option for runway.
Designer gets about two thirds of the weight of engineering and excels in a different set of criteria, mostly divided between the benefits of growing the team and making better first impressions on the outside world. Because our team of three currently does not have a designer (it’s currently me!), it’s a bottom option for coordination cost and team cohesion given the risk of onboarding the wrong person. It’s notable that each result is only as good as the criteria that informed it; I completed this example, for instance, before we understood the enormous design challenge of presenting so much complexity on our results screen (we’re now in the process of onboarding a design firm).
Including criteria also helps teams better understand dissent. In this roadmapping example, I disagreed with the team consensus on prioritization for our frontend roadmap. This exercise highlighted a disagreement on the impact of restyling the create screen, but also exposed my lack of knowledge on the progress the team had already made on building it:
In this release, we’ve also shipped a set of seven high-quality templates that show the depth and breadth of possibilities we can now support:
Allocating equity among cofounders (link)
Roadmap prioritization using Intercom’s RICE framework (link)
Ship/no-ship decisions using Reddit’s product values (link)
Investment decisions using Andressen Horowitz’s investment criteria (link)
Deciding on where to move (link)
Deciding to get a dog (link)
Rank the best Beatles songs (link)
We can’t wait to hear what you think of these new features. If you have any questions, feedback, or would like a personal demo of our new site, please email me at james@condorsay.com.
With gratitude,
JB