👋 Hey {{first_name|there}},
Your team applies the same scrutiny to every technical decision. Here's the triage that tells you which ones actually need a review and which ones just need a green light.
Why this matters / where it hurts
Someone opens a pull request to swap an internal HTTP client library. Reasonable change. Low blast radius. But the team treats it like a database migration, scheduling two meetings, drafting a design doc, circling through three rounds of async comments. Two weeks pass. The feature work stalls. And the library swap that could have shipped on a Tuesday afternoon is still sitting in draft.
Now picture the opposite. Someone picks a new message broker for a critical payment flow during a Friday standup. No doc. No review. Just a confident "I'll set it up." Six months later, three teams are coupled to a broker nobody fully understands, and switching away would burn a quarter.
These look like different problems. They're not. Both happen because the team applies one level of scrutiny to every decision, or none at all. Library swaps get the same ceremony as schema changes, and someone will call a meeting to debate folder structure as if it were a public API contract. In Lesson #40 on ADRs, we covered how to make decisions findable. This week is about what comes first: figuring out which decisions deserve the ceremony.
🧭 The shift
From: "Every architecture decision needs thorough review."
To: "Match the rigor to the reversal cost."
The framing comes from Jeff Bezos. A one-way door is a decision that locks behind you. Expensive to undo, painful to reverse, and sometimes flat-out impossible. A two-way door is the opposite. You walk through, look around, and if you don't like what you see, you walk right back out. The cost is low. The damage is minimal.
Here's the thing most teams get wrong. The vast majority of their decisions are two-way doors. Perhaps 70 or 80 percent of the choices made in a quarter fall into this bucket, yet teams default to a heavyweight ceremony for all of them because treating everything as critical feels responsible. It isn't. It's slow. And slow, applied uniformly, is its own kind of risk.
Default to action on two-way doors. Ship it, measure it, reverse if needed.
Reserve heavyweight review for one-way doors only. These are the choices that create lock-in, touch external consumers, or reshape data you can't easily reconstruct.
When in doubt, ask one question: "What would it cost us to undo this in 30 days?" A couple of days of work? Two-way door. Move.