Episode #2 of Revisiting Product Engineering - Decision making

All of us are making decisions all the time and no one deliberately wants to make poor decisions for the product we care for. It is the notion of time and circumstances that are acting upon which concludes the health of those decisions.
Not all decisions are same, a problem has to be solved before Christmas because there is an opportunity cost, if the problem is solved after the Christmas it will loose its value , some decisions are strategic and can wait , for example we have to optimize the development cost , some decisions are hard to change for example choice of a programming language to solve problem and some decisions are easy to change.
We as humans have biases and as group we have group biases too,on the other side we are socially influenced through social media , our friends in technology talking about new shiny technologies , someone talking about a technology in some conference and we fall for these temptations and form preferences and opinions. We should not forget as mentioned in the purpose that our purpose is to solve problems. I have seen many times that decisions made by engineers are based on preferences and opinions for example a practice is better then some other practice , we should do that. What we are missing many times are realities , yes every one of us wants that shiny straight surface with everything smooth but realities are far from straight road. The purpose of decision is to move forward. So how do we take decision ?

First and foremost data is the key, try to make decisions based on the data.The type of work we are engaged in is effected by multiple variables , and I came across the concept UCurve optimisation in the book Principle of Flow in product development ,and I think it can help in making tradeoffs.
I also think for decisions which are hard to change for example choice of a programming language we should take into account global picture rather then thinking locally .

Even then there is always the case that decision turns out unhealthy, but the learning from that decision should be incorporated for improvising the decision making process for next time.