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Tracking team decisions

Gabrielle LaMarr LeMee & Sophie Ho

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How do good leaders track decisions?

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What’s the issue?

As journalism becomes more interdisciplinary and less siloed, decisions become harder to track.

We’re good at tracking what we do, but not so much why we’re doing it.

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What is a decision?

Think: Promo locations, story assignments, data visualization choices

Where are they? Slack conversations, meetings, Google docs...and more!

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Decision tracking & us

Gabrielle: Communicate why decisions were made

Sophie: Replicate/learn from successful tactics and strategies

Gabrielle - at Chalkbeat, the product team recently launched a new brand and redesigned site that involved a lot of changes that we were working on for most of the past year. The design decisions that we made were based on strategy discussions around how we wanted people to move around the site, taking into consideration analytics on current patterns, and our organizational goals of highlighting local coverage and our newsletters. Throughout the process we created around 50 google docs, 30 Figma files, over 600 github commits, hundreds of Airtable tasks, and countless slack messages. These records were useful to create summaries for staff to explain the changes but as things changed and we started moving more quickly, it became difficult to keep all of those documents updated and we instead relied on the knowledge in our brains for the reasons for the latest changes. This meant that we had to check with each other and the sometimes we would have differing reasons for things that had been done. Now that it is over, and we expand our team, I am thinking about how to capture these decisions in one comprehensive place, like a strategic style guide.

Sophie - one of the things I used to do in a previous job was write extensive post mortems after a breaking news event. So I spent a lot of time documenting, talking to people about how the workflow was, what they thought about certain decisions, and writing documentation about the whole thing. But I was the only one taking the lead on this, and it’s hard to keep up the momentum once the “shininess” of a new process wears off.

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What are we doing now?

The who, what, where, when, and why of your current decision making/tracking process.

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Think about your team:

What decisions do you track?

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Think about your team:

Where are you tracking your decisions?

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Think about your team:

When are you tracking your decisions?

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Think about your team:

Who on your team tracks decisions?

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Think about your team:

Why do you track your decisions?

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Challenges

What’s not working?

Where is it not working?

When is it not working?

For whom is it not working?

Why is it not working?

What is missing?

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How can we address these challenges?

Who, what, where, when, why, and how...

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Let’s get started:

What could you be doing next week?

What could you be doing in 3 months?

What could you be doing next year?

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Let’s get started:

What could you be doing next week?

Decision Days

What could you be doing in 3 months?

Retrospectives and postmortems

What could you be doing next year?

LEARNING...�GROWING...�ADAPTING...

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Photos of sticky notes from the session: WHAT

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Photos of sticky notes from the session: WHERE

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Photos of sticky notes from the session: WHEN

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Photos of sticky notes from the session: WHO

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Photos of sticky notes from the session: WHY