Decision Session
One critical product question. One focused day. A direction you can act on.
The decision gets made either way
Every week a critical product question stays open, it gets answered anyway — by whoever ships first, by the loudest opinion in the room, or by a backlog that quietly commits to a direction nobody agreed to. The cost of that isn’t the week. It’s the quarter spent building the wrong half.
A Decision Session puts one focused day against one question, with someone whose work is product decisions and who has no stake in which way it goes.
Who it’s for
- Founders and product leads with one open decision holding up a roadmap.
- Teams split between two defensible directions and no evidence that separates them.
- Product teams about to commit engineering weeks to something nobody has tested.
- Anyone who needs a direction they can defend to a board, a client or a team on Monday.
Questions worth a day
The session works on one decision, named precisely. These are the shapes it usually takes:
- Which of these two directions should we build first, and what would prove it was right?
- What is the smallest version of this that is still worth shipping?
- Where does this AI feature have to show its work before anyone will rely on it?
- Onboarding loses people in the first session. Is that an interface problem or a product problem?
- We have a year of feature requests. What is the actual product underneath them?
How the day runs
- 01Before — 30 minutes
A short call to name the question precisely and agree what a good answer would look like. You send whatever already exists: the deck, the backlog, the analytics, the half-built thing. Nothing needs preparing beyond that.
- 02The day
One focused working day with the people who can say yes. We work through the question, the constraints, the people who would use it, and the options actually on the table — sketching and pressure-testing the direction in real time rather than presenting at the end.
- 03After — within two working days
A written decision memo: the recommended direction and the reasoning behind it, the options ruled out and why, the risks that would change the answer, and the smallest next step that would produce real evidence.
What you’re left with
The decision memo, the sketches and flows produced during the day, and one named next step with a scope small enough to start on.
If the honest answer is that nobody can decide this without evidence, you get that too — along with the cheapest experiment that would settle it. That is a result, not a failed session.
When not to book one
Not when the decision is already made and what you actually need is production design. Not when the question is really five questions that need separating first — say so on the call and we will do that instead. And not when the people who can say yes cannot be in the room, because then the day produces a recommendation nobody is in a position to act on.
The judgement behind the day
Ten years of product design, most of it on complex B2B, enterprise and AI products where the wrong direction is expensive to reverse:
- What if my question is bigger than one day?
- Then the first job is cutting it down to the one decision that unblocks the rest, which is usually the useful outcome anyway. If it genuinely needs more than a day, the memo says so and scopes what would actually answer it.
- Remote or on-site?
- Remote by default, on a shared screen and a working file. On-site in Munich or elsewhere in Europe when the team needs to be in one room; travel is billed at cost and agreed beforehand.
- Who should be in the room?
- The people who can say yes — usually a founder or product lead plus whoever owns engineering. Three or four people is the useful maximum. More than that and the day turns into a presentation.
- Does the fee count towards a larger project?
- Yes. If the session leads into a Validation Sprint within 30 days, the €1,250 is credited against it in full.
- How does payment work?
- One invoice after the session, payable within 14 days, plus VAT where it applies. The price is fixed before the day starts and does not move afterwards.
Start with the 30-minute call
The session begins with a short call to agree the question and check a day is the right size for it. If it isn’t, that call will say so and cost you nothing.