The hardest part of our projects this year has been the same every time, and it has nothing to do with design. Getting a decision out of the founder. Founders were always busy, so that part is not new. What changed in the last year is worth saying out loud though. AI made starting things cheap. A founder who would have run one thing is now running five, because execution got cheap and saying yes got cheaper. More shipping, more going on, more in flight at once. What did not change is how many good decisions one person can make in a week. So you get someone who is genuinely doing more than they were two years ago, and who is also the bottleneck in six places at the same time. From inside it feels like achieving more. From outside it looks like nobody can get twenty minutes. We changed how we work because of it. We stopped asking for feedback, because feedback is an open question and open questions are the most expensive thing you can put in front of a busy person. Now we send decisions instead. Two options, which one we recommend, and the date we move forward on if nobody objects. Most founders take the recommendation. The ones who don't reply in one line, which is all we needed anyway. And we own everything that does not actually need them. Every question you send a founder costs them something, and honestly most questions are the designer avoiding a decision they could have made themselves.

Giving the founder two options and a deadline makes the decision easier to answer. I'd put the cost of changing it later beside each option, so they can see which choices need their attention now.