Vitamin J for Engineering Leaders: Judgment

Imagine this. Two teams are asking for the same three engineers. One team is working on a reliability problem that could become serious. The other is building a product initiative tied to an important company goal. Both have data, both have reasonable arguments, and both believe their work should come first. You have to decide where to allocate those engineers.

Engineering leadership is full of situations like this. The higher you go, the fewer decisions have an obviously correct answer.

You rarely get perfect information. You rarely know all the consequences, and you often need to make a decision before you feel completely ready.

This is why engineering leaders need good Judgment, I call Vitamin J.

Engineers are trained to look for evidence. We measure latency, availability, conversion, velocity, defects, incidents, customer satisfaction, and dozens of other signals before making decisions.

But leadership decisions are often made with incomplete data.

Should we rewrite or incrementally improve a system? Should we promote someone who is performing well but hasn’t demonstrated every aspect of the next level? Should we reorganize a team that is functioning reasonably well because we believe another structure will work better in the future?

There may be data informing all of these decisions, but data can’t tell you everything in those ambiguous situations. At some point, leadership requires judgment.

We often associate judgment with seniority, and experience certainly helps. Seeing hundreds of projects, incidents, hiring decisions, and organizational changes gives you a larger library of patterns.

But experience alone does not guarantee good judgment. Someone can have twenty years of experience and simply repeat the same assumptions for twenty years.

Good judgment comes from converting experience into better mental models. Blind pattern matching is dangerous; what matters is continuously learning from experience and converting those lessons into better judgment.

When you face a difficult decision, you can find it useful to mentally examine a few ingredients.

Separate facts from assumptions. “We experienced three incidents this quarter” is a fact. “This architecture will become impossible to maintain next year” is a prediction.

Both may be important, but they should not carry the same weight.

Many bad decisions result from assumptions that slowly turn into facts as they move through an organization.

Good judgment begins by separating facts from predictions.

Not every decision deserves the same amount of analysis. Some decisions are easy to reverse, and others create consequences that last for years.

Changing a dashboard metric is easy to undo, whereas choosing a new foundational architecture is considerably harder.

Before spending weeks debating a decision, ask whether it is reversible. For reversible decisions, speed often matters more than precision. You can make the call, observe what happens, and adjust.

For irreversible or expensive decisions, slowing down may be the right choice.

Many disagreements are not actually about the solution; they are about the objective and the trade-offs. One person might optimize for velocity, another for reliability, and others for long-term maintainability.

All three may be rational and right, but it is often about what we’re trying to optimize; hence, defining the principles driving the decision is critical.

Not every decision deserves leadership attention. Engineering leaders can easily spend their entire day making small decisions. Individually, these decisions seem harmless, but collectively, they create decision fatigue.

When your cognitive energy is consumed by low-value decisions, the quality of important decisions eventually declines. Engineering leaders should delegate decisions and deliberately choose which decisions require their attention. For example, you lead a group with 4 teams, and you could delegate the decision about the on-call process for two of the 4 teams to one of your managers. Deciding a re-org could be a more important decision you might want to focus your attention on.

A decision should not disappear after it is made. Whenever possible, define what would tell you whether the decision was good. If we move engineers to this initiative, what do we expect to improve? If we launch despite the technical debt, what risk are we accepting? If we reorganize the team, what should be different six months from now?

Define the expected outcomes behind each important decision so you can learn and improve from them. You should observe the outcomes that follow from the decision, but be wary: a good decision can produce a bad outcome, and a bad decision can occasionally produce a good one.

The goal is not to judge decisions solely by what happened afterward, but to improve the process that led to the decision.

One of the simplest ways to improve judgment is to write down important decisions. Nothing complicated, capture this in a document or note, then look back six months later.

Human memory is surprisingly good at rewriting history. After something succeeds, the decision often feels obvious, and after something fails, the risks suddenly seem obvious too.

A decision log preserves what you actually knew at the time, and over time, patterns emerge. Maybe you consistently underestimate migration costs, or perhaps you are too conservative when information is incomplete. Those patterns are extremely valuable, and they are the raw material from which judgment improves.

There is another misconception about good decision-making. We sometimes associate strong leadership with certainty, and once a leader makes a decision, they need to stand behind it. Conviction and stubbornness are not the same thing, though.

Good leaders can say: “Given what we knew then, this was the right decision. Given what we know now, we should change it.“

Changing your mind when the evidence changes is not a leadership failure; it demonstrates adaptability and intellectual honesty. On the other hand, refusing to change because your identity has become attached to the original decision is a failure.

The healthiest engineering organizations are not led by people who always know the answer. They are led by people who create systems that consistently produce better decisions.

To make better decisions, Vitamin Judgment is one of the most important capabilities an engineering leader can develop.