Decision History
Every decision keeps its reasoning, owner, and evidence, so anyone can ask why the product works this way.
In this video
- The record
- The source
- The owner
- The next conversation
The reasoning stays
when people move on
Brief keeps the reasoning behind each decision, even when the person who made it isn’t around. A teammate gets the whole record instead of a setting nobody can explain.
What Brief keeps with every decision
- What was decided
- The decision in one line, with its status: confirmed, pending, or superseded.
- Why
- The reasoning in the team’s own words, including the alternative they turned down.
- The evidence
- A link to the review, thread, or document where the call was made.
- Who owned it, and when
- The decision owner and the date, so nobody has to remember the meeting.
- When to ask again
- The conditions for revisiting it, so anyone can check whether the reason still holds.
The source
Every record links to the document where the decision was made, with the reasoning intact.
- The decision, and the condition to revisit it.
- Every option the team weighed, and how each landed.
- The reasoning behind the call.
- What the decision allows today.
- The triggers for reopening it.
Documents
User ResearchMeridian sourcesQ1 reporting review
Q1 reporting review
Decision at a glance
QBR exports default to 12 peer benchmarks.
Revisit when customer feedback on benchmark volume is available and industry tagging can support a meaningful filter.
Alternatives considered
- Twelve peer benchmarks
- Tradeoff: More material for the account manager and sponsor to scan
- Outcome: Selected as the default
- Eight benchmarks with an industry filter
- Tradeoff: Peer accounts do not yet have industry tags; the filter would imply a distinction the data cannot support
- Outcome: Rejected for now
- Leave selection to each account manager
- Tradeoff: Keeps preparation manual and makes the exported story difficult to reproduce
- Outcome: Does not solve the product problem
The reason for rejecting eight
The team did not conclude that eight is inherently too few. The objection was the missing industry context. A filter labeled “industry” would look precise while operating on data that could not reliably support it.
Implementation boundary
- Apply twelve as the default for QBR peer benchmark exports.
- Continue using the approved CDP for customer data, rather than building a separate path to make filtering possible.
- Keep the selected default explicit when shaping tickets and reviewing implementation.
- Bring a proposed change back for review before treating it as accepted scope.
Review conditions
- Customers provide feedback on volume
- Question to answer: Does the full peer set help the review, or distract from it?
- Industry tagging becomes available
- Question to answer: Can a filter now provide a defensible comparison?
- A replacement is proposed
- Question to answer: What changed, which alternative is now feasible, and who approves it?
The useful evidence is the customer’s explanation and the status of the dependency. The passage of time alone does not choose a new default.
Ask whether the
reason still holds
A teammate can see the tradeoff and ask whether the original reason still holds, without finding someone who remembers the meeting.
Find out why your product
works the way it does
See Brief bring back the reasoning behind one of your own decisions, with its owner, the alternatives, and the sources.