Options are how a room avoids deciding.

The most important project I worked on at Lyft had twenty people in the room. That was not the sign of commitment we all took it for.

This was the project meant to unify Lyft's transportation modes in a single app: passenger, transit, bikes and scooters, marketplace, AV. Roughly twenty designers, researchers and product managers had produced a great deal of good work and no decision. Our CEO was in the room, which at that size of company tells you what was riding on it. I was asked to take it over.

## Options as avoidance

Nothing was missing. That was the first thing I learned. Not talent, not research, not ideas. Twenty capable people can generate options indefinitely, and options had become the deliverable, because producing another direction is safer than arguing for one. Responsibility had spread so thin that no one person would have called any part of the work theirs. So no one could be wrong. So nothing could be decided. None of that required anybody to do anything wrong. It is what a room of twenty does to a decision.

Twenty capable people can generate options indefinitely. Options are how a room avoids deciding.

A large team on a stuck project usually looks like commitment. Sometimes it is the cause of it: every person added raises the coordination cost and lowers the personal cost of being wrong.

## Subtraction

I cut the team to seven. Nobody lost their job over it, and the thirteen went to work that needed them. I would still handle it better today, starting with the order I did it in. The new structure went to the room before I had sat down with any of them one to one. Being moved off the company's flagship reads as a verdict unless somebody spends real effort making it not one, and I started spending that effort a week after the announcement rather than before it. One of those conversations has stayed with me. Whatever I said in it, what they heard was a demotion.

Choosing the seven was the real design decision. I did not select for seniority. Two of the seven were mid-level. I selected for the willingness to hold a position in a room where the CEO might disagree, and the appetite to own it afterwards. Judgment, in other words. And the nerve to spend it.

## Three directions

We cut the concepts down to three, argued them against each other honestly, and picked one. Nothing exotic in the mechanics. Fewer people, each holding more of the problem, and disagreement made cheap early instead of expensive late. In user testing of the resulting tab view, use of the modes beyond rideshare (bikes, scooters, transit) rose by half. Our work traveled further than the app. It featured in the roadshow materials for the March 2019 listing.

A smaller room changed the argument before it changed the design. With twenty people, disagreeing was expensive. Objecting in that room cost you something in front of an audience, so objections arrived late, softened, or in the hallway afterwards. With seven, arguing was simply the work. We put the three directions on the wall and made each person attack the one they preferred. It sounds like a workshop trick. It worked as insurance. By the time the CEO saw the recommendation, its weaknesses had been found by the people who liked it most.

Speed followed for a reason that had nothing to do with effort. Add a person and you add a line to every other person; add a person who can decide and you have simply added a decision. Seven people who trust each other cover more decisions per week than twenty people covering for themselves.

## Judgment density

One rule I took with me. On a stuck project, what you are short of is almost never capacity. It is judgment density: how many people in the room are able to decide something, against how many can only produce more work. Twenty people had produced plenty. Almost nobody in that room was positioned to end an argument. Adding producers dilutes it. If a project matters enough to be staffed like a department, it usually matters enough to be run like a founding team instead.

None of which makes small the answer. Small teams fail too, and when they do there is no slack to absorb it. Size should follow the shape of the decision to be made. Ours needed seven. Yours may well need twenty.

We followed the same logic across the organization later. Director-level peers and I redesigned the structure around the app's new surfaces, and it outlasted all of us. That does not happen at a company unable to change its mind. I was handed the project, the mandate to shrink it, and no argument about either. Shrinking the team was never the point. Deciding was, and the team's size was what stood between the room and a decision.

I led product design at Lyft through the multimodal transition.