A worked example
One email. One record. One lesson, three months later.
Vantia is invented — 45 people, B2B software, invented for this page. The record below is invented with it. What is real is the shape: these are the fields the product records, and the PDF at the bottom is rendered by the same builder that exports a live workspace’s decision.
The workspace
What this team told Decize it cares about.
Values are picked at setup and goals are added in Settings; an owner or manager can change either later. They are why a decision can be read against something other than whether it sounded reasonable in the moment.
Values
- Sustainable pace
- Deliver what we promise
- Grow deliberately
- Say the trade-off out loud
Four, in the team’s own words, never rewritten. Decize estimates how each decision serves them, labeled an AI estimate until someone confirms it.
Active goals
- Deliver every onboarding inside 30 days
- Reach 60 active accounts by year end
A decision is linked to at most one goal, and Decize links one only when the message makes it obvious. Nothing is filed under a goal to make a chart look fuller.
What somebody sent
It started as this email.
Not written for Decize. Sent to the team list on a Monday, with the capture address copied in — which is the only thing anybody did differently.
From Priya Raman
To leads@vantia
Subject onboarding backlog
We are three weeks behind on onboarding and two of the PMs are cooked. Options were (a) hire a third PM now, (b) bring in a contract PM from the agency, or (c) cap new client onboarding at four a month until the end of Q3.
Going with (c). Hiring takes ten weeks we do not have and the agency PM costs more than the revenue we would defer. Pretty confident this is right, though it means telling sales to slow down. Cap starts Monday, I own it, we review it end of Q3.
The same day
What the record held by Monday evening.
Decize drafted the title and summary, read the owner, deadline, door type, goal and confidence from the message, and saved it to the ledger. Nobody filled in a form. Confidence came from the words “pretty confident” — when a message signals nothing, that field stays empty rather than being guessed — and it counts toward calibration only because Priya confirmed it with one tap.
Cap new client onboarding at four a month instead of hiring a third PM
Onboarding is three weeks behind and two PMs are at capacity. Hiring takes ten weeks we do not have and a contract PM costs more than the revenue the cap defers, so intake is throttled until the end of Q3.
Value alignment
Sustainable pace
+0.9
Deliver what we promise
+0.6
Grow deliberately
+0.1
Say the trade-off out loud
-0.5
Serves Sustainable pace, strains Say the trade-off out loud. An estimate until a person confirms it — and worth remembering when you read the lesson below.
One quarter later
The part a document folder cannot do.
Two weeks after the deadline, by default, Decize starts asking the owner by email how it went: a tap and Save, no login, never more than twice a week — or just a reply with a sentence, and Decize emails back the answer it picked to confirm with one tap. Priya replied after the Sep 30 review and confirmed its pick, so the confidence she confirmed in June could finally be compared to what happened.
Outcome
Mixed
Delivery recovered — 11 of 12 onboardings closed inside 30 days. The revenue assumption did not hold: about $25k was lost rather than deferred.
Calibration
Overconfident
Confidence 4 of 5, confirmed in June, against a mixed outcome, as the retrospective read it. The verdict stays on the record; the team’s confidence-versus-outcome chart counts it, and on Business so does the Brier score.
The lesson on record
When we throttle intake, write the revenue being deferred in the same sentence as the capacity being protected - otherwise the trade-off gets re-litigated in month two.
Here the team wrote it on the decision; the AI retrospective’s takeaway stays in the retrospective.
Related decisions
Earlier decisions in this workspace about the same thing, surfaced automatically with how each turned out — including the hiring call that ended in regret.
- Pause the partner integration to clear the migration backlogsuccess2025-11-04
- Hire two PMs at once ahead of the Q1 pipelineregret2025-08-19
- Use the agency for overflow design work through Q4mixed2025-09-30
The message went to a team list with the capture address copied. Decize drafted the title and summary and read the owner, deadline and confidence from it. Priya confirmed the confidence with a tap, and after the review replied with a few sentences, confirmed the outcome Decize picked from them, and added a short note. Nobody filled in a form.
Your turn
Start the record with one decision.
Take the same document with you, or make the first entry in your own ledger. The free plan carries 10 decisions a month, for as many people as you like.