Stakeholder brief
Sales promises a new corporate returns portal in the same 10-week release. Finance will not relax approval controls; engineering has capacity for only one of portal access or warehouse integration.
Decision brief
Create a one-page decision brief with stakeholder interests, non-negotiables, three options, evidence needed, recommendation and escalation route. Rebaseline scope and acceptance criteria after a decision.
Deliverable template
Problem / evidence / assumptions: Options and tradeoffs: Recommendation and rationale: Decision owner / governance: Dependencies / risks / mitigations: Success measure / review date:
Worked example & tradeoffs
A staged warehouse-first release may improve the bottleneck but disappoint sales; a manual corporate pilot can test demand cheaply but adds operational load. Compare customer volume, contractual commitments, control risk and cost of delay. Use the accountable sponsor to decide, and record dissent and assumptions. Do not decide by the loudest stakeholder or silently remove controls.
One defensible approach. Your decision can differ if your evidence and tradeoffs support it.
Write the artifacts in your own words. Use identifiers to connect the objective, requirements and tests.