I’ve noticed making high-level decisions at a mid-stage company is trying. Prioritizing at a startup is easier, because you have less groups clamoring for your attention. But when marketing asks for more money for ad campaigns and the engineering team complains about how they’re overworked and need another developer — how do you know which ones to select and execute on?

One way is to draft a list of all these priorities and ask everyone to vote. This approach democratizes decision-making, which, if done too much, can lead to a company without a clear product drive.

Another way is to ask two questions. Everything boils down to numbers.

Question 1: What are the inputs?
For example, if you want a marketing campaign, do you need more money for Google ads (external) ? Do you need to a month of engineering time (internal)? Often people think about external costs, but forget about the cost of internal company resources, which are just as valuable.

Question 2: What are the outputs?
All businesses have 3 goals. So these inputs must be manipulated in some way to generate output into one or more of these company goals:

• (1) Revenue
• (2) Cost savings
• (3) Market growth

Thus, the decision about what to build becomes simple. You make the decision based on the input/output ratio.