Your team is debating a pricing experiment it can switch off next week if the numbers look bad. By Bezos's framework, how should the manager handle it?

Let a small group decide quickly, because it's easily reversible

Run a careful, consultative review since pricing is high-stakes

Let a small group decide quickly, because it's easily reversible

🚪 One-way doors vs. two-way doors

In his 2015 letter to Amazon shareholders, Jeff Bezos split decisions into two kinds. Type 1 decisions are one-way doors: consequential and nearly irreversible. Once you walk through, you can't easily come back — think selling the company, firing a key executive, or committing to a database that will be painful to migrate off. These deserve slow, careful deliberation and lots of consultation.

Type 2 decisions are two-way doors: changeable and reversible. If you don't like what's on the other side, you walk back through and try something else — a new meeting format, a pricing test, a feature toggle. Bezos argues these "can and should be made quickly by high-judgment individuals or small groups."

The trap he warns about: as companies grow, they start applying the heavyweight Type 1 process to Type 2 decisions. The result is slowness, risk-aversion, and a failure to experiment — what Bezos calls "Day 2" stasis. Good managers first ask which kind of door they're facing, then match the speed and ceremony of the decision to the cost of being wrong.