Last Responsible Moment
As a colleague and I were talking on Friday about an important architectural decision that was upcoming, we felt the typical pressure to make the right decision about it, right now. But there were two key components of the decision that helped us to pick an alternative lower-pressure path. One, the decision wasn’t urgently needed. It’s important, but not urgent. Two, it’s fundamental to the application we’re building, but there’s a prototypical solution that we found that would unblock the team while still allowing us flexibility in the solution to replace it with something better later.
As a result, we chose the interim prototype and we delayed the final decision. It might sound like punting on an important decision (which it is!), but not in an abdication-of-responsibility kind of way. There’s a quote that’s repeated here that “we’ll never know less about this than we do right now”, meaning that we always learn more that could influence our decisions as we go. Therefore, finding a way to delay a decision is valuable, up to a point. After that point, we feel the pain of having waited too long.
There’s actually a name for this point in time in the decision-making process. It’s called the “last responsible moment”, or the point at which we know the most about the problem and options and there’s still time to make the call responsibly. Read more about it here: