The best product decisions are made in DMs, not standups

Last week, I found myself rewriting the same Slack DM for the fourth time.

It started as a harmless comment - something like "hey this feature feels off, do you have 5?", and turned into a 200-word mini pitch about why we should kill a feature we just spent last 2 sprints building.

The funny thing? That DM got the decision made.

Not the Figma file.
Not the Jira ticket.
Not the standup where everyone politely nods while secretly scrolling through their own to-dos.

Just a private, unpolished, slightly nervous DM. Sent on a random Wednesday.

It made me realize: the best product decisions are almost never made in meetings.
They're made in the grey zone - in 1:1s, hallway chats, shared screenshots, random voice notes at 2 AM. Or shower maybe 😅

This isn't a new idea. But it keeps slapping me in the face.

I've now worked in startups for over a decade. I've sat in "war rooms," design reviews, growth syncs, investor updates, weekly demos. And yet - the conversations that actually move things? They're never scheduled.

They happen when the pressure is low, when egos are off, and when it's just two people going:

"Wait? why are we even doing this?"

Some of the best product shifts I've seen happened like this:

• A DM from a designer: "Can we just hide this onboarding screen and see what happens?"
• A late-night message from a PM: "What if we skipped sign-up flow entirely until KYC is required?"
• A WhatsApp voice note (which I hate) from a developer: "I think we can do this in 3 hours if we skip the caching nonsense."

None of these came from Jira.

And ironically, if they had come up in a standup, someone would've shot them down with a "let's discuss async" and the idea would've died before it lived.

We think structure = progress.

But the moment a decision enters a calendar invite, it becomes less honest. Less risky. More defensible.

We start speaking in slides.
We hedge our opinions.
We pretend to be "aligned" when we're just tired.

This also explains why certain folks are "secretly" 10x.

They aren't louder. They're just always in the loop.

They know which PM is secretly stressed about the metrics.
They sense which feature the founder doesn't actually care about.
They ask the stupid questions when no one's watching.

Their edge isn't velocity. It's access.
They're the routers. The unofficial routers. And they shape the roadmap more than you think.

So maybe this is just a rant about how informal > formal. Or maybe it's a reminder to trust the backchannel.

If you're a founder, listen to the DMs.

If you're a designer, send more voice notes.

If you're an engineer, don't wait for grooming to pitch that crazy fix.

Because somewhere in the middle of your ramble, the next game-changing idea might fall out.

P.S. I still believe in process. We run tight sprints. We use JIRA. We do retros.
But I've stopped pretending those are where the magic happens.

That happens when two people say,
"Sahil, this doesn't feel right. what if we just...?"

or

"give me 2 days to implement this..."

And then everything changes.