RB's Action Test: A Mental Model for Enterprise Velocity
Raza Balbale
The Problem
Enterprise teams routinely spend hours, days, and weeks in discussion loops before acting. Alignment meetings, approval chains, stakeholder reviews, and consensus-building rituals consume calendar time that compounds silently. Meanwhile, the cost of inaction grows and competitors ship.
The assumption is that more discussion reduces risk. The reality is that excessive deliberation is itself a risk, one that rarely appears on any dashboard.
RB's Action Test
Before entering any prolonged decision cycle, ask one question:
Could a team of three, with an AI assistant, build the following in less time than we are spending to decide?
- A landing page
- Authentication and role-based access control
- Payment and billing integration
- Email integration
- Social analytics and tags
- Support forms
If the answer is yes, you are paying a decision tax that exceeds the cost of building and shipping the product itself. The discussion has become more expensive than the work.
We are in a prompt-based economy. Every feature listed above can be built and shipped to production in hours with an AI assistant. The barrier is no longer technical capacity — it is organisational inertia.
How to Apply It
This is not a mandate to skip due diligence. It is a calibration tool. Use it to detect when process has overtaken progress.
When a feature request, enhancement, or fix enters a multi-week approval cycle, run the comparison. If the deliberation window exceeds a reasonable build window for the scope above, the organisation is optimising for consensus at the expense of outcomes.
The Bias Worth Adopting
A strong action bias does not mean recklessness. It means defaulting to execution when the cost of reversal is low and the cost of delay is high. Most product decisions in SaaS fall into this category. Ship, measure, adjust.
Teams that internalise this model spend less time defending hypotheticals and more time generating signal from real usage. That signal is the corrective mechanism — real data replaces speculative debate, and course corrections happen in days rather than quarters.
In Short
Measure your decision cycles against build cycles. If it takes longer to talk about the work than to do the work, the process is the bottleneck, not the problem you are trying to solve.