Give Your Gut Credit: Judgment-First Decision Making
Every decision a human makes is a judgment call — so ask 'what do you think?' not 'what do you know?'
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- 88%
Fried's position is that unless a machine is deciding, every business decision is a judgment call: data is one input among thousands of absorbed, undescribable ones. Rather than pretending otherwise, he builds language and rituals that legitimize intuition — asking how things feel, never demanding justification, refusing to chase certainty — and models it openly so the rest of the team is licensed to do the same.
Origin
Jason Fried, who says this will be the subject of his next book. He cites Charlie Munger — in a small Zoom Q&A, Munger told him that a lot of great things and innovations happen precisely because you don't know how they are supposed to be done, so trust your instinct.
Core principles
- 01Everything is a judgment call. Executives are hired for judgment and experience, not spreadsheet literacy.
- 02Your gut has absorbed everything — including things you don't know it absorbed. Give it credit.
- 03Humans are primarily feeling creatures with a rational side, not the other way around.
- 04Certainty is the wrong target; 'how does this feel' beats 'how certain are you'.
- 05Ignorance of how it's supposed to be done is a creative advantage, not just a gap.
- 06Post-mortems on failure mostly produce a story everyone can agree on — not the truth.
How to run it
- 1
Name the decision as a judgment call
Stop pretending a number made the call. Data can be an input, but a 51-vs-49 chart is not a decision. Admit that thousands of absorbed experiences are doing the work.
- 2
Change the question you ask
Ask 'what do you think?' rather than 'what do you know?'. Thinking implies an opinion whose origins you can't fully trace, which is exactly what you want on the table.
- 3
Make 'how does this feel?' the default review language
How does this screen feel, this flow, this feature, this word, this sentence, this paragraph, these colours. Feel is the most-used word in the company's product conversations.
Pro tip This is the mechanism that transmits gut-driven decision making down from the founder — demonstrating it creates space for others to do it.
- 4
Ban 'justify that'
Never ask someone to justify or prove an opinion, and shy away from any language about certainty. That vocabulary kills intuition before it's spoken.
- 5
Let the process be rambling until the output is precise
Accept that the thought process is amorphous and you find your way as you go, until you land on 'that's it, that feels right'. Precision arrives when it's out in the world, not in the deliberation.
- 6
Don't over-analyse failure
Resist forensic post-mortems on software failures. You don't know why you make decisions, and you don't really know why things didn't work — you'll settle on whatever explanation the group can agree on so it can move on.
Watch out This exemption applies to complex, multi-input human work. A mechanistic system — a stamping machine producing ovals instead of circles — genuinely can and should be root-caused.
In the wild
Fried got an hour on a Zoom call with Charlie Munger and asked one question: is there power in being completely ignorant about something? Munger's answer was to trust your instinct — a lot of innovation happens precisely because you don't know how other people do it.
→ Fried says it gave him confidence to keep following his gut, and became a likely seed for his next book on intuition in business.
When companies hire executives, they say they want judgment and experience — not the ability to read an Excel spreadsheet or a chart, which anyone can learn.
→ Fried uses this as proof that even the most data-oriented organizations implicitly pay a premium for exactly the amorphous, absorbed judgment they claim not to run on.
Common mistakes
Pretending you're data-driven when you're judgment-driven
Data is one of thousands of inputs. Dressing a judgment call in a chart doesn't make it rational — it just hides the reasoning and stops the team from examining the real one.
Founder-only intuition
Fried acknowledges it's easy for him — he owns the place and can't be fired. If leaders don't visibly make gut calls and actively invite 'how do you feel about this', nobody below them will dare, and the culture reverts to justification theatre.
Hiring people with no gut and expecting instinct
Judgment-first decision making depends on people whose gut is full of ideas. An academic product person can be excellent elsewhere but will not function in this system — which makes the hiring process load-bearing.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders and design/product leaders in taste-led companies who are tired of manufacturing data to justify decisions they've already made on instinct
Not ideal for
Mechanistic, high-volume, or safety-critical systems where root cause is genuinely recoverable, and teams whose members lack the domain experience for their gut to be worth anything
From the transcript
“this is part of a thing I want to write up I've been thinking about writing about this I think everything's a judgment call”
“I would just say that give your intuition credit”
“we say what do you think we don't say what do you know”
“how does this screen feel how does this flow feel how does this feature feel how does this word feel”
“we don't I try to tend to to shy away from anything that's about certainty uh we're not after certainty”
From the episode
Jason Fried challenges your thinking on fundraising, goals, growth, and more