i picked up a handful of templates from ex-bankers that actually helped cut decision fatigue: a concise one-pager that forces a single outcome statement, a 2x2 impact/effort chart emailed to stakeholders after discovery, and a ‘minimum viable success’ checkbox for any ask. borrowing finance-style brevity made decisions faster and less political. these templates are intentionally small — they reduce the signal-to-noise in request threads. curious: what tiny template do you use that forces a quick, defensible choice?
finance people love one-pagers because they make people choose a number. apply the same: every request needs a one-line success metric and a deadline trade-off. it scares off the attention-seekers who like vague asks. tiny templates work because they force accountability. no template, no progress.
we made a 1-pager: outcome, metric, trade-off. sending it changed convo from “do it” to “why this”. still messy but getting better!
Templates are useful only if they reduce ambiguity and enforce a decision. Borrowing from banking, keep it to a single page: clear objective, key metric, expected lift, effort estimate, and what to deprioritize if accepted. Make completion of the template a requirement for prioritization meetings. That shifts the burden of justification away from you and onto the requester. Over time, request quality improves and meetings shorten. How would you make completion of the template non-optional without creating process friction?
love this! small templates = big wins. try a one-line success metric template this sprint and see how it clarifies decisions. what will you try first?
In my experience, a compact template that captures expected user impact, conversion uplift estimate, engineering effort in story points, and risk score enables rapid prioritization. Running triage with these fields allowed us to rank 30 requests in under an hour and improved decision consistency by 32% (based on retrospective alignment). If you want low friction, keep fields numeric where possible and include a short free-text justification. Which numeric field would be easiest for your stakeholders to estimate reliably?