Do you know what decisions you're making?

*** A quick note: I’m hosting a webinar with Kaleidoscope’s Bogdan Knezevic on Thursday, October 24th at 2pm EST. We’re calling it Billion Dollar Decisions: How Kaleidoscope is Shaving Months Off Drug Development Timelines. You can sign up here. This is a pilot for a potential series of webinars highlighting different apps in the Biotech Reference Stack. More on that later. ***

One of the things that I went back and forth on while designing the Biotech Reference Stack, was whether or not to include components that most teams handle informally and generally don’t think about. There are a number of these on the site, but this week I want to focus on two that are particularly egregious: The component at the top called “Questions or Decisions to Make” and the one at the bottom called “Records of Interpretation and Decisions.”

Now, I want to make it very clear that I have never worked with a biotech startup that had a central list of all the decisions they were planning on making and all decisions they had made in the past. Maintaining something like that would be way more effort than it could possibly be worth. No one in their right mind would even suggest such a thing.

And yet, there they are.

The thing is, most of the components in the Reference Stack don’t stand for a single system or tool or database in your own stack: They stand for a type of functionality that you should be thinking about, whether you implement it in one form, in multiple forms, or just informally.

In the case of these questions and decisions, no one has a central database of all of them. But many teams have records of specific kinds of questions and decisions: Which assays have been validated? Which targets will you build programs around? Which hits will you promote to leads?

Each of these questions is actually a family of individual questions. And you probably have a list of the things you need and answer the individual questions about, somewhere in some form. Maybe they’re in a database. Maybe they’re in your head. Whatever it is, that’s what those components represent.

My goal in putting them in the Reference Stack is twofold: First, I want you to think about what those lists are for your team, how they’re implemented today, and whether you want to make them a bit more formal. Second, for the ones that aught to be a little more formal, I want you to be able to find software that’s already been designed to do this, so you don’t have to build it from scratch.

If you get a chance to click through the site, it’s worth thinking about what each component looks like in your current stack, whether it’s one system, multiple systems or just in people’s heads. Then ask yourself if that’s where you need to be.

In the meantime, I’m working on ways to make the site easier and more intuitive to use. If you have any thoughts on what you’d like to see on there, feel free to reach out. You can reply to this email, leave a comment, find me on Bits in Bio Slack or however else. As I make these improvements, I’ll be announcing them on here. So stay tuned!

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Thanks for reading this week’s Scaling Biotech! I really appreciate your continued support, and I read every comment and reply.

As a reminder, I offer several services to help connect biotech teams with tools, practices and expertise to make their organizations more data driven.

• The Biotech Reference Stack is a website designed to help biotech data teams identify the tools they need and figure out how to put them together.

• For help navigating the Reference Stack, sign up for a free consultation call to clarify a problem you're facing and identify the best options to evaluate.

• Or if you’re building software that makes biotech more data driven, find out how to add your app to the Reference Stack.