The Weighted Decision Spreadsheet
List your options, weight your criteria to 100%, score and multiply — then let the reaction tell you the answer.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 88%
A structured method for making hard decisions (job changes, where to move, funding choices). You lay out your options, identify and rank the criteria that matter, assign each criterion a relative weight summing to 100%, score each option, and multiply out. The insight is that often just naming the criteria — or your emotional reaction to the computed result — reveals the answer before you finish. It keeps you data-informed rather than data-driven.
Origin
A personal decision-making spreadsheet Nicole Forsgren developed and shares with mentees and friends; she used it on her own choice to start DORA, which flipped from her lowest-ranked to her highest-ranked option once scored.
Core principles
- 01Be crisp about your objectives and definitions first.
- 02Naming the criteria that matter is often enough — people frequently know their answer before the next step.
- 03Weights must sum to 100% to force real prioritization.
- 04Be data-informed, not data-driven — the numbers inform a judgment, they don't dictate it.
- 05Your reaction to the result (including the urge to fudge the numbers) is itself signal about what you actually want.
- 06You can't fund or pick everything — the point is a defensible cutoff.
How to run it
- 1
List all your options
Write out every option on the table — the jobs you could take, the places you could move, the initiatives you could fund.
- 2
Identify the criteria that matter
Name the criteria important to you — e.g. for a job: total comp, prestige, team, job predictability, work-life balance; for a move: proximity to an airport, food scene, cost.
Pro tip Sometimes this step alone ends the exercise — a mentee will name their criteria and immediately say 'I know what my answer is.'
- 3
Weight each criterion to sum to 100%
Assign each criterion a relative importance weight, making all weights add up to 100 percent.
- 4
Score and multiply
Give each option a score on each criterion, multiply by the weights, and total it up in the spreadsheet.
- 5
Read your reaction, then decide
Treat the result as data-informed input. If your instinct is to fudge the numbers to get a different answer, or the coin-flip reaction reveals what you were hoping for, that reaction is the real signal. Often the numbers yield a category of acceptable options and you choose within it.
Pro tip Pair this with the strategy principle that the key to a good strategy is knowing what not to do — and the key to executing it is actually not doing those things.
Watch out You don't get to pick everything; if you fund every option, things will fail. Define a cutoff and hold it.
In the wild
When deciding what to do next, Forsgren initially ranked starting DORA as her lowest option. After walking through the weighted spreadsheet — laying out options, criteria, weights, and scores — it came out as her highest-ranked choice.
→ The structured exercise overturned her gut ranking and led her to found DORA.
Forsgren notes she has sometimes multiplied everything out and then caught herself fudging the numbers to force a preferred result, or used a coin-flip whose landing tells you by your reaction what you actually wanted. With mentees, simply naming the criteria often ends the decision before scoring.
→ The tool works less as an oracle and more as a mirror that surfaces the decision you were already leaning toward.
Common mistakes
Trying to fund or choose everything
Leaders with many options who fund all of them guarantee failures; the framework exists to force a ranking and a cutoff, not to validate doing it all.
Being data-driven instead of data-informed
Treating the computed score as an unquestionable verdict ignores the signal in your own reaction to it — the numbers should inform judgment, not replace it.
Is it for you?
Best for
Anyone facing a high-stakes multi-option personal or business decision (job, relocation, portfolio funding) who wants to get crisp on criteria and priorities.
Not ideal for
Trivial or reversible choices where the overhead of building a weighted model isn't worth it, or decisions where you refuse to let intuition override the math.
From the transcript
“walking through the spreadsheet is often all you need to do in order to know what the decision is”
“when I started Dora I I did this uh starting Dora I thought was my lowest once I walked through the spreadsheet it became my…”
“for each criteria what's their relative weight what's their importance and I make it add up to 100 percent and then I like this is…”
“the key to having a good strategy is knowing what not to do and the key to executing a good strategy is actually not doing…”
From the episode
How to measure and improve developer productivity
Nicole Forsgren (Microsoft Research, GitHub, Google)