List the questions I must answer before making a decision
The 10 most important questions to answer before you commit, ranked by how much each could change the decision, with how to answer them.
The prompt
Help me identify the questions I need to answer before I make this decision.
The decision: [e.g. "whether to switch our CRM vendor", "whether to open a second location"]
Options I'm considering: [LIST, or "not sure yet"]
Deadline: [WHEN I need to decide]
What I already know: [FACTS, data, constraints]
Who is affected: [teams, customers, partners]
Is it reversible? [easy to undo / costly to undo / permanent]
Return:
1. The 10 questions, ranked by how much the answer could change the decision. For each:
- Why it matters.
- What answer would push me toward or away from each option.
- How to answer it (data to pull, person to ask, test to run) and rough effort.
2. Questions I can skip - things that feel important but wouldn't change the decision.
3. Questions I probably can't answer in time - and how to decide sensibly without them (e.g. a pilot, a reversible first step, a decision trigger).
4. Kill criteria - what answers would mean I should not go ahead.
5. A short checklist I can use in the decision meeting.
Cover the usual blind spots: cost of doing nothing, second-order effects, who could block it, implementation capacity, and how we'd measure success. The decision stays with me; don't make it for me.
Highlighted [brackets] are blanks to replace with your own details.
Fill in the blanks and use this promptMore Thinking & Decisions prompts
What to fill in
- LIST, or "not sure yet"
- WHEN I need to decide
- FACTS, data, constraints
- teams, customers, partners
- easy to undo / costly to undo / permanent
How this prompt is built
This prompt follows the Few-Shot structure (Few-shot prompting). A few-shot prompt includes one or more worked examples of the input and the output you want, so the model can copy the pattern instead of guessing it.
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