This will make you a better decision-maker

Annie Duke, author of Thinking in Bets and Quit and a former professional poker player, discusses decision-making with host Lenny Rachitsky, including lessons from her late friend Daniel Kahneman. The conversation covers how to run more independent, structured decisions in meetings, how to make decisions with long feedback loops, using pre-mortems with kill criteria, and why quitting is so hard.

01Key learnings

• Make implicit judgments explicit (e.g., a hiring rubric) before using intuition; Duke cites Kahneman's work lifting hiring hit rates from roughly 50% to 65%.
• Gather opinions independently and asynchronously before meetings, then use the meeting only for discussion, focusing on where people disagree.
• Reserve meetings for discussion; discovery of views should happen beforehand and decisions should be made by an accountable person or a private vote.
• Avoid the word 'alignment' as a goal; seek understanding, reflect people's views back, and accept that disagreement may persist, then decide anyway.
• Treat feedback loops as shortenable: track necessary-but-not-sufficient signals (like raising a Series A) to evaluate decision quality long before final outcomes.
• Run a pre-mortem only with pre-commitments: define specific kill criteria and the actions you will take when those signals appear.
• Recognize that people tend to quit too late due to sunk cost, endowment, and identity biases; compare decisions against what you would do if starting today.
• Use mental time travel and 'nevertheless' to gain perspective and balance listening with following through on decisions.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.