Asynchronous Decisions Making

When working in any team that needs to take decisions, well every one of them.You want to take the best decision possible to make your team go forward.

Open source communities are well known for being awesome at working asynchronously, innovativly, having healthy (and less healthy) debates minimizing meetings and chats.

Why not borrow some practices from open-source communities and bring those to your internal company community.

Introducing changes through asynchronous decisions

Rust has this awesome RFCs (request for comments) process, where everyone inside and outside of Rust, can come up with ideas and comment on existing ideas. In the end, this brings a better more awesome rust programming language. And the trust in decisions is greater since everyone could bring their expertise on.

Why not apply this RFC process internally in your company or product team. I made this experiment recently at Pleo and it turned out giving us great results.

ps. Python has its PEP process. A lots of other communities got theirs

Change introduction

It’s pretty simple overall

1. You create a repository or have a way to share documents and comment on them
2. Have a decent template. The template for Rust was minimally adapted as it is a really great one
3. Use review requests as a way to comment and have discussions on the proposals.
4. Establish a “closing date” so that discussions don’t drag on forever

Lie down some ground rules that minimize bikeshedding.

Small note: Thanks to the Rust programming language RFC process.