Martin Eriksson | How I Tested The Decision Stack
Summary
In this episode, I’m joined by Martin Eriksson, founder of Mind the Product and author of The Decision Stack, to talk about how organizations can make better decisions from strategy all the way down to everyday execution.
We talk about the difference between speed and velocity, why empowered teams still need strategic context, and how assumptions exist at every layer of an organization, not just inside individual products.
We also explore what AI changes and, maybe even more importantly, what it doesn’t. Building has become drastically faster and cheaper, but that doesn’t eliminate the need to understand the customer, the business, and whether or not you should be building something in the first place.
If you want to learn more about how strategic choices connect to everyday decisions and how assumptions can be tested throughout your organization you’ll love this episode.
Takeaways
- Speed without direction is not enough. Teams can build, ship, and test faster than ever, but without strategic alignment they may simply move in different directions more quickly. Martin frames this as the difference between speed, velocity, and organizational momentum.
- Empowered teams still need strategic context. Autonomy works best when teams understand where the business is going, how it plans to get there, what matters now, and how their work connects to those choices.
- Assumptions exist at every layer of the organization. They are not limited to products or experiments. Vision, strategy, objectives, opportunities, and execution all rest on assumptions that can become dangerous when they remain unspoken.
- Strategy is a series of connected choices. The value of a decision stack is not just having vision, strategy, objectives, opportunities, and principles—it is making sure those decisions connect from the top down and can be traced back from everyday work.
- Use testing and discovery on strategic decisions, not only product decisions. Teams have become good at de-risking what is directly in front of them, but the same tools can be applied to bigger bets around strategy, markets, and the future of the business.
- Not every assumption can be eliminated, but it should be named. At the strategy and vision level, some choices will always remain bets on the future. Making those assumptions explicit allows leaders and boards to monitor when conditions change and decide whether the risk is still acceptable.
- AI changes the economics of building, not the fundamentals of product. Faster and cheaper delivery reduces feasibility risk, but teams still need to understand customer value, business value, usability, distribution, pricing, and whether something should be built at all.
Guest Links
Martin’s Website: https://martineriksson.com/
Martin’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martineriksson/
Coherent & Wrong: https://www.thedecisionstack.com/coherent-and-wrong/
