---
title: "Make Great Decisions Quickly with TOMASP"
description: "Technical leaders and managers face high-impact decisions about hiring, technology, architecture, and priorities, but cognitive biases, short-term emotion, and overconfidence can distort judgment. TOMASP is a framework for making decisions timely, considering alternatives, defining decision criteria, examining uncertainty, and preparing to be wrong. It recommends timeboxing the decision, generating at least three options, making a meta-decision about optimization criteria, analyzing options, stepping back from emotion, and preparing to be wrong through prototypes and tripwires. In the Flutter rewrite example, Michelle compares alternatives against cross-platform consistency, performance, and development speed, then sets a two-week prototype and blind test. The framework treats decision quality as a function of how a choice is made and implemented, not simply its eventual outcomes."
---

# Make Great Decisions Quickly with TOMASP

[Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify) · 2023-10-18 · Oct 22, 2019

**Type:** Tutorial

## Summary

Technical leaders and managers face high-impact decisions about hiring, technology, architecture, and priorities, but cognitive biases, short-term emotion, and overconfidence can distort judgment. TOMASP is a framework for making decisions timely, considering alternatives, defining decision criteria, examining uncertainty, and preparing to be wrong. It recommends timeboxing the decision, generating at least three options, making a meta-decision about optimization criteria, analyzing options, stepping back from emotion, and preparing to be wrong through prototypes and tripwires. In the Flutter rewrite example, Michelle compares alternatives against cross-platform consistency, performance, and development speed, then sets a two-week prototype and blind test. The framework treats decision quality as a function of how a choice is made and implemented, not simply its eventual outcomes.

## Context

Technical leaders and managers must make high-impact decisions, but the post says people are naturally prone to cognitive biases, short-term emotional weighting, and overconfidence about the future. The framework is intended to help make complex decisions quickly while reducing these distortions.

## Approach / What changed

TOMASP structures decisions around timeboxing, generating more options, deciding how to decide, analyzing options, stepping back from immediate emotion, and preparing to be wrong. The example applies the framework to a possible Flutter rewrite by comparing alternatives, defining optimization criteria, and testing a prototype with a blind evaluation.

## Takeaways

- A great decision is judged by whether it is timely, considers alternatives, recognizes biases and uncertainty, and is properly made and implemented—not solely by its eventual outcomes.
- For a hard-to-reverse decision, TOMASP recommends aiming to decide within the same week; otherwise, the target is the same day.
- Michelle’s Flutter example uses a two-week prototype and a blind test to gather evidence before committing to a broader rewrite.

**Tags:** [Decision-Making](https://yomu.fyi/topic/decision-making)

- Source: [Shopify](https://shopify.engineering/make-great-decisions-quickly-with-tomasp)
- Source URL: https://shopify.engineering/make-great-decisions-quickly-with-tomasp
- Ingested by Yomu: 2026-08-31T01:13:41.085Z

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