Two-Way Door Decisions

When assessing and prioritizing the opportunity space, it’s important that we find the right balance between being data-informed and not getting stuck in analysis paralysis. It’s easy to fall into the trap of wanting more data, spending just a little bit more time, trying to get to a more perfect decision. However, we’ll learn more by making a decision and then seeing the consequences of having made that decision than we will from trying to think our way to the perfect decision.

Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, made this exact argument in his 2015 letter to shareholders,³³ where he introduced the idea of Level 1 and Level 2 decisions. He describes a Level 1 decision as one that is hard to reverse, whereas a Level 2 decision is one that is easy to reverse. Bezos argues that we should be slow and cautious when making Level 1 decisions, but that we should move fast and not wait for perfect data when making Level 2 decisions.

I prefer the imagery of one-way door and two-way door decisions. With a one-way door decision, the idea is that, when we make the decision, we walk through the door. Upon entering the space on the other side of the door, we are able to see the consequences of our decisions. Unfortunately, because it’s a one-way door, if we don’t like what we see, we can’t turn around and walk out through the door again. This is what Bezos calls a “Level 1 decision.” For these types of decisions, we want to be cautious, data-driven, and deliberate in our decision-making.

With a two-way door decision, on the other hand, when we walk through the door, if we don’t like what we see, we get to turn around and undo our decision. This is what Bezos calls a “Level 2 decision.” He suggests that, with a two-way door decision, we’ll learn more by acting—walking through the door and seeing what’s on the other side—than we would by trying to imagine what’s on the other side of the door.

When we assess and prioritize the opportunity space, even though these are some of the most strategic decisions we make as a product trio, we are still making two-way door decisions. When you choose a target opportunity, you are choosing how to spend your next few days or weeks. You are not committing to addressing that opportunity. You are simply committing to exploring it further with your discovery work. If, as you proceed to explore solutions, you learn that this wasn’t the best decision (e.g., you learned something new, you found the solutions to be tougher than you imagined, you learned it wasn’t as important to customers as you thought), you’ll simply turn around and choose another target opportunity.

It’s important that we frame our discovery decisions as two-way door, reversible decisions. Lottie Bullens and colleagues, social psychologists at the University of Amsterdam, found in a series of studies that, when people viewed a decision as reversible, they continued to critically evaluate their decision after making it. In fact, they were more likely to see the negative attributes of their choice and the positive attributes of the alternatives after making the decision if they viewed it as a reversible decision. If they framed it as an irreversible decision, the opposite happened. People noticed only the positive attributes of their own choice and the negative attributes of the alternatives.³⁴ If we want to stay open to being wrong and avoid confirmation bias, it’s critical that we think of our prioritization decisions as reversible decisions.

The beauty of a continuous discovery process is that we can always course-correct as we learn. So, as you assess and prioritize the opportunity space, relax. Make the best decision you can, given what you know today, and know that, if you got it wrong, we’ll simply revisit the decision when we need to.