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Decisions, Risks, and Experiments

Tickets show what the team is doing. Decisions, risks, and experiments explain why the work is moving in a particular direction and what the team is learning.

Use these records when context should survive beyond one conversation, meeting, or ticket comment.

Decisions​

Decisions record important judgment calls. Use a decision when a choice should be visible later, especially if a team may revisit the tradeoff.

A useful decision includes:

  • Title: the decision in plain language.
  • Context: why the decision is needed.
  • Decision: the choice that was made or proposed.
  • Status: proposed, active, superseded, or another workflow value your team uses.
  • Scope: organisation, project, group, or user.
  • Consequences: what changes because of the decision.
  • Alternatives: what was considered but not chosen.

Create a decision for architecture choices, product tradeoffs, customer policy calls, pricing assumptions, prioritization choices, and operating-process changes.

Work with Decisions​

Review open and proposed decisions during planning. When a decision becomes durable, update the status and connect follow-up work with tickets or roadmap epics.

Use project scope for decisions that only apply to one product, implementation, customer, or initiative. Keep company-wide decisions at organisation scope.

Good decision hygiene:

  • Keep the statement short and direct.
  • Include enough context for someone who was not in the meeting.
  • Link related tickets, docs, risks, or roadmap epics.
  • Supersede the decision when a newer decision replaces it.

Risks​

Risks track uncertainty that could affect delivery, customers, operations, product direction, or company strategy.

A useful risk includes:

  • Title: the uncertainty or exposure.
  • Description: what could happen and why it matters.
  • Severity: impact if it happens.
  • Likelihood: probability or expected chance.
  • Mitigation: what the team is doing to reduce or monitor the risk.
  • Status: active, mitigated, archived, or another lifecycle value your team uses.
  • Scope: organisation, project, group, or user.

Use risks for delivery blockers, ambiguous dependencies, technical debt that could affect commitments, customer rollout concerns, operational fragility, data quality issues, and strategy assumptions that need monitoring.

Work with Risks​

Review risks before accepting roadmap changes, committing to deadlines, or changing project scope. A risk should either have a mitigation plan or a reason the team is consciously accepting it.

Good risk hygiene:

  • Name the concrete impact.
  • Keep severity and likelihood current.
  • Assign follow-up tickets for mitigation.
  • Archive risks that no longer apply.
  • Convert resolved strategic uncertainty into a decision or memory when useful.

Experiments​

Experiments capture what the team tried and what it learned. TOW treats experiment results as memory-backed knowledge, so the learning can be found later by search, chat, and operating review.

Use experiments for:

  • Product discovery tests.
  • Customer pilots.
  • Pricing or packaging tests.
  • Growth and marketing experiments.
  • Operational process changes.
  • Technical evaluations where the outcome should inform future decisions.

An effective experiment record explains:

  • The hypothesis.
  • The audience or sample.
  • The method.
  • The result.
  • What the team learned.
  • Whether the learning changes a decision, risk, roadmap item, or ticket.

Connect the Records​

Use the right record for the job:

  • Use a ticket for work to do.
  • Use an epic for a larger execution outcome.
  • Use a decision for a durable choice.
  • Use a risk for uncertainty that needs monitoring.
  • Use an experiment for a tested learning.

When these records reference one another, reviewers can understand both the work and the reasoning behind it.