Slow vs Fast Decisions
For any reversible decision there's no right or wrong — only slow and fast — so decide fast and correct fast.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 85%
For any decision that is reversible and won't get you jailed or kill your company, Kamat reframes the choice as slow-vs-fast rather than right-vs-wrong. A wrong decision made fast is discovered and corrected sooner than a 'right' decision reached after months of deliberation. The explicit caveat: this does NOT apply to potentially fatal, irreversible decisions (healthcare, military, compliance) where a wrong call can kill a user or the company.
Origin
Mayur Kamat's life motto, a close cousin of Jeff Bezos's one-way vs two-way door (reversible vs irreversible) decision framework.
Core principles
- 01For reversible decisions, speed beats correctness — you'll catch and fix wrong calls
- 02A fast wrong decision plus a correction still beats months of deliberating for the right one
- 03Gate the rule on reversibility and survivability, not on how big it feels
- 04Fatal or irreversible decisions (health, military, company-killing compliance) are exempt
How to run it
- 1
Classify the decision's reversibility
Ask whether the decision is reversible and non-fatal — it won't get you into jail or kill the company. If so, it qualifies for the fast track.
Watch out Irreversible or potentially fatal decisions (healthcare, military, existential compliance) are explicitly excluded — do not speed-run these.
- 2
Decide fast on the reversible ones
For qualifying decisions, choose quickly rather than optimizing for the perfectly-right answer, treating slow-vs-fast as the only real axis.
- 3
Let speed surface and correct errors
If the decision was wrong, deciding fast means you learn it was wrong and correct it sooner — still faster than the months you'd have spent seeking the right answer.
In the wild
Kamat names explicit exceptions to the motto: anything that might kill your user (healthcare, military) or kill your company (compliance) must not be sped up — everywhere else the slow/fast framing holds.
→ Keeps a bias-for-speed rule from being misapplied to existential, irreversible calls.
Common mistakes
Deliberating for months on reversible calls
Spending months seeking the 'right' answer on a reversible decision is slower than deciding fast, being wrong, and correcting — you pay a time cost with no upside.
Applying it to irreversible decisions
Speed-running a call that could kill a user or the company (health, military, compliance) is exactly where the rule breaks and must not be used.
Is it for you?
Best for
Operators and product leaders prone to over-deliberating on low-stakes, reversible decisions
Not ideal for
Irreversible, safety-critical, or company-ending decisions that demand slow, careful analysis
From the transcript
“there's no right or wrong decision. They're just slow and fast decisions”
“if you're doing something that might kill your user like healthcare or military or or even compliance which can kill your company, don't use it”
“for anything that's reversible, anything that's not going to get you in jail or kill your company, no right or wrong decisions, just slow or…”
From the episode
Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more
Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product)