Decision Logs: Capture Why You Chose

Why Decisions Matter

Decisions are the currency of product development. Yet most teams and corporate professionals treat them like ephemeral events: an offhand note in a commit message, a fleeting Slack message, or a forgotten mental bookmark.

When you capture the reasoning behind a choice—what alternatives you considered, what you expected to happen, and which assumptions you made—you enable two powerful capabilities:

Fast context recall when you return to a project

Automated surfacing of dependent decisions when assumptions change

How to Write a Decision Log

Make it simple and consistent. Each decision entry should answer three questions:

What: What did you choose?

Why: Why did you choose it over alternatives?

Assumptions: What are you betting on?

With just these three fields, your future self stops guessing. Tools like Unvios structure decisions so they become queryable memory instead of scattered notes.

Practical Examples

Database choice: "Choose Postgres over MongoDB because we need relational joins and ACID guarantees. Assumption: write volume stays moderate."

Feature tradeoff: "Ship a simpler onboarding flow now; assume 30% conversion is acceptable for alpha users."

Benefits for Corporate Professionals

Corporate professionals evaluating AI adoption juggle multiple AI initiatives and business problems. Decision logs reduce cognitive load, speed up re-entry into paused evaluations, and make it easier to undo or revise choices when assumptions fail.

Start today: record your next non-trivial decision and notice how much faster you move afterwards.