In many software teams, decision-making is driven by habits, blindly following best practices, or the latest trends - rather than a clear understanding of the problem. Microservices are a perfect example. Teams often break systems into smaller services because it feels like the “right” approach and everyone else is doing it too. Before a single service is deployed, the architecture is already overcomplicated - not because of bad intentions, but because we never stopped to ask: what problem are we actually trying to solve?

Through real-world examples, we’ll discuss how to think critically about the way decisions are being made in your company. We’ll introduce concepts like participation theater—when people perform the rituals of decision-making without making real decisions—alongside problem restatement as a tool to uncover the real challenge at hand. We’ll also examine different types of decisions (reactive vs. proactive, reversible vs. irreversible) and why recognizing them early changes how you should approach them.

This talk is a call to slow down to speed up your decision-making. Whether you're an engineer, architect, or tech lead, this session will challenge you to pause before reaching for Kubernetes (or other technologies) and instead ask: what problem am I really trying to solve?