Note: the following is part of the first chapter of my book Orbit – An Agile Framework for Better, Focused, Adaptive Product Development, you can follow it here. I’ll publish the book little-by-little on the LeanPub.

In today’s (really, really, oh yes again really) fast-paced and complex world of software development (AI-based era), simply delivering features isn’t enough. True success lies in building products that genuinely solve user and business problems, adapting quickly to change, and fostering strong, collaborative teams. This requires more than just a set of to-do tasks (or features or epics, or whatever you would like to call it); it demands a deep shared understanding, transparent communication, and an adaptable workflow.

Flow of Decision

Please note that for simplicity, I have omitted the crucial roles like UI/UX, researcher, etc. in the following. But I will come back to them later in the book! So please, stay calm and continue with me 🙂

Imagin the XCompany, a buzzing startup full of caffeine, ambition, and conflicting opinions. You’ve got a visionary CEO named Carla, a perfectionist QA lead called Nina, a marketing wizard named Leo, a process-loving PM named Julia, and a bunch of developers and testers who actually build the thing. And of course, thousands of users out there waiting for something that makes their lives easier.

Now, when I say flow of decision, I mean how ideas move from we should do this to it’s live in production. Who decides what? Who stops it? Who forgets to tell the dev team until Friday afternoon? The path a decision takes says everything about how alive or how stuck your product organization really is. Let’s peek into a few different worlds inside XCompany.

The Top-Down Flow: When the CEO Has a Vision (Again)

One morning, Carla the CEO bursts into Slack: I had a dream last night! We should build a Smart Budget Tracker with AI that predicts people’s future spending habits. The PM, Julia, dutifully adds AI-Powered Budget Predictions to the roadmap. The devs nod politely, the testers sigh quietly, and three months later the team proudly ships it.

The only problem here is the biggest problem. Nobody uses it. Turns out, users didn’t want their spending predicted, they just wanted an easier way to split bills with friends. Carla meant well, but she guessed instead of listened. That’s the top-down flow in action: (seemed)efficient, confident, and totally disconnected from reality.

The QA Flow: When Quality Becomes a Religion

Then there’s Nina, the QA lead. She guards the release gate like a medieval knight with a bug-tracking sword. Nothing goes live until it’s perfect, she declares. Developers start to fear her approval more than production outages. Weeks pass while she debates whether a tooltip alignment counts as a blocker.

By the time the perfect build goes out, users have already moved on, or found bugs no one even thought of. The flow of decision here is less like a river and more like a clogged drain. Quality is everyone’s job, but at XCompany it became one person’s throne.

The Marketing Flow: When the Hype Train Has No Brakes

Leo, the marketing guy, is a genius at making noise. Unfortunately, he’s also a bit too good at it. One Monday morning, he launches a campaign with the tagline: Introducing the world’s first AI-powered financial life coach! The product doesn’t actually have a life coach feature, or even a working dashboard yet, but hey, details.

The dev team panics, the PM starts damage control meetings, and users keep emailing support asking, Where’s my AI coach? Suddenly, the team is building to match the marketing instead of solving the real problems. The hype train has derailed, and everyone’s running behind it with buckets of glue.

The PM Flow: When the Backlog Becomes the Bible

Julia, the PM, believes deeply in process. Maybe too deeply. She keeps a 400-item backlog in Jira, color-coded, prioritized, and polished like a museum exhibit. Every decision must go through her. Developers can’t fix a typo without a Jira ticket and a two-hour refinement meeting.

The result? Hmmm, okay! Nobody remembers why they’re building things, only what Jira says to build next. The road from an idea to a developer’s keyboard becomes a bureaucratic obstacle course. Julia’s not a bad PM, she’s just trapped in the illusion that control equals clarity. Spoiler: it doesn’t.

The Dream Team: When Everyone Orbits the User

Now imagine a different version of XCompany. Here, the team starts every discussion with one simple question: What’s bugging our users this week? Everyone, developers, designers, testers, marketers, together with Julia the PM, sits together to figure it out.

They discover that users aren’t struggling with budgeting itself, but with starting. So, the designer, Mina, sketches a friendlier onboarding screen. Developer Sam builds a prototype in a day. Nina tests it with five users, tweaks the wording, and they ship it by Friday. Carla hears about it after it’s live, and she loves it because it actually works.

In this team, the road from decision to keyboard is almost instant. No heavy approval chains. No 17-slide presentations. Carla, the CEO, and Leo from marketing still contribute, they give hints, context, and inspiration, but they don’t decide what to build. They’re clue-givers, not commanders. They act like the team’s internal users: they feed insights, not orders. They don’t push or dictate; instead, they provide the right context, support the crew, and trust them to make the calls. Their job is to empower the team, not control it, to delegate authority, not reclaim it. The magic is that the team treats user feedback like gold. The users are not an afterthought; they’re the compass. Every critical decision starts with their problems and loops right back to them for validation.

If decisions only flow downward, you get obedience without understanding. If they get stuck with QA, Marketing, or the PM, you get confusion dressed as process. But when the team orbits around the user, decision flow becomes fast, clear, and alive.

Orbit isn’t about hierarchy, it’s about shortening the distance between insight and action, between I think and It’s shipped. The shorter that path, the healthier your team.

The Social-Rank Trap

Of course, not every decision flow fails because of process. Sometimes, it’s the people. In some teams at XCompany, senior engineers dominate discussions. Junior developers and testers hold back, even when they have data that contradicts the prevailing opinion. Decisions default to the loudest or most senior voice, not the best idea.

This is the social-rank trap, when hierarchy or ego distorts the flow of information. Groupthink sets in. The team loses its ability to question assumptions. And the product loses its edge.

Healthy decision flow requires more than structure, it needs culture. A culture where rank doesn’t outweigh insight, and expertise is respected wherever it sits.

The flow of decision defines how alive your organization is.
If it’s blocked, if decisions only travel downward, the system grows rigid and slow.
If it’s chaotic, if everyone decides everything, focus dissolves.

But when it circulates freely, guided by shared understanding and open feedback, the team becomes both clear and agile.

That’s the essence of Orbit: to create a working decision flow, one that doesn’t just tell people what to do, but helps everyone understand why they’re doing it, and how to improve it together.