Momentum dies when teams treat every decision like it is irreversible.
Why Product Lawyers Need a Better Decision Lens
In-house product counsel spend a surprising amount of time untangling slow decisions. Not because the legal issues are complex. Not because the team is irresponsible. The real drag comes from a deeper problem. No one agrees on which decisions are safe to move quickly and which require deliberate, documented, cross-functional judgment.
The result is familiar. Product managers over-escalate. Engineers hesitate. Legal becomes the default “decider” for matters that do not truly need legal ownership. Meanwhile, genuine high-risk decisions sometimes sneak through unexamined because the team is exhausted from treating every choice with the same level of scrutiny. When everything feels irreversible, nothing moves with confidence.
This problem sits at the core of modern tech development. AI, automation, rapid shipping cycles, and integrated systems all heighten uncertainty. Teams want speed. Legal wants clarity. The business wants impact. Without a decision framework that distinguishes between reversible and irreversible decisions, everyone slows down for the wrong things and speeds through the wrong things. Momentum becomes erratic.
The reversible–irreversible distinction is one of the simplest tools a product lawyer can use, yet most organizations never formalize it. They rely on intuition, hierarchy, or whoever raises the loudest concern. That approach is unpredictable, energy-draining, and often risky.
The Hidden Cost of Treating Every Decision the Same
Most companies fall into one of two traps. The first is over-caution. Teams slow down because they think every decision might create legal or compliance exposure. This creates unnecessary escalations that clog workflow. The second is false confidence. Teams race forward with decisions that seem simple but involve commitments, dependencies, or user impact that are difficult to unwind.
Both patterns have real costs. Over-caution drains product velocity and erodes morale. False confidence creates operational debt that legal is forced to clean up later. Without a shared way to identify which decisions are reversible and which are not, even highly competent teams misallocate time and attention.
When product counsel steps in with clarity, everything changes. Lawyers who can help teams classify decisions early become facilitators of speed, not barriers. They reduce unnecessary back-and-forth. They help teams understand risk in the context of business impact. They teach teams how to make good decisions without legal needing to join every conversation.
This is the work in-house product lawyers are increasingly being asked to do. Yet very few have a repeatable model to support it.
Why Reversibility Matters More in Today’s Product Environment
Product teams operate in constant motion. Features ship incrementally. AI systems evolve. User behavior shifts weekly. Decisions that once seemed high stakes may now be easy to reverse with a simple configuration change. Other decisions that look harmless may create lasting dependencies in data architecture, user trust, or regulatory classification.
This is where the reversible–irreversible framework earns its value. It helps lawyers diagnose the true nature of a decision from the start. It separates actions that can be revised, rolled back, or iterated from those that lock in risk or create meaningful external reliance. It gives teams permission to move fast when speed is safe and permission to slow down when diligence is necessary.
Legal does not need to be everywhere. Legal needs to be where reversibility drops.
Where Product Counsel Can Bring Immediate Clarity
Product counsel can make a measurable impact by bringing structure to six pressure points that cause friction in most organizations. These include early product design, sales escalations, privacy implications, AI model decisions, commitments to customers, and executive-facing trade-offs. In each area, teams benefit from understanding whether they are dealing with decisions that are easy to adjust later or ones that will be costly to unwind.
The reversible–irreversible lens helps reduce unnecessary escalations in these moments. It also helps counsel shape conversations around trade-offs rather than fear. When lawyers explain decisions through the language of reversibility, the team can see the practical consequences more clearly. It builds trust because it removes the mystery behind why one decision requires friction and another does not.
This is not about being permissive. It is about being precise.
The Power of a Repeatable Decision Diagnostic
The resource you provided, the Reversible or Irreversible Decisions Framework, is built around a simple three-question diagnostic. This diagnostic helps lawyers quickly identify the decision type and calibrate the diligence, documentation, and timing required. That repeatability is what makes it valuable. Good judgment scales when you can teach others how to apply it.
The template also includes practical examples across product, privacy, sales, and executive contexts. It includes communication phrasing that helps explain reversibility and trade-offs to business teams. And it offers an implementation guide that helps lawyers integrate the model into intake forms, approval workflows, and retrospectives so the organization internalizes the approach. Readers can access the full framework here.
With the right tools, reversible–irreversible analysis becomes a fast, reliable way for legal to reinforce speed without sacrificing discernment.
Where This Framework Fits Into the Future of Product Counseling
As product cycles accelerate and AI permeates more systems, product counsel must move beyond issue spotting. They must help teams build decision systems that scale. The reversible–irreversible model is one of the simplest and most effective starting points for this shift. It transforms legal’s role from a final checkpoint to a partner who strengthens the system that produces decisions.
This evolution is not theoretical. It is becoming a core competency. The best product lawyers use frameworks like this to align expectations, reduce ambiguity, and ensure that the right level of scrutiny is applied at the right time. They help teams move faster by teaching them how to decide.
Speed with judgment is the new competitive advantage. The teams that master it will build better, safer, more resilient products.
Building Product Judgment Requires Deliberate Practice
Having a framework is one step. Building the instincts to use it well is another. Product law is a discipline that rewards practice. Decision-making under uncertainty, especially for AI-powered features, gets easier when lawyers have worked through enough scenarios to see patterns.
If you want to deepen these skills, you can explore training tools designed for this specific kind of judgment work. One option is early access to Coach Frankie, the Product Law beta. Frankie offers scenario-based coaching, real decision cycles, and structured reasoning prompts to help lawyers practice making product decisions with speed and clarity. You can sign up here.
Strong product counsel do more than say yes or no. They help teams understand which decisions matter, why they matter, and how to make them with the right balance of speed and care. The reversible–irreversible framework gives you a practical way to do that work reliably across the product lifecycle.
It is not a theory. It is a practice. And it is becoming one of the most valuable capabilities an in-house lawyer can build.
Olga V. Mack is the CEO of TermScout, where she builds legal systems that make contracts faster to understand, easier to operate, and more trustworthy in real business conditions. Her work focuses on how legal rules allocate power, manage risk, and shape decisions under uncertainty. A serial CEO and former General Counsel, Olga previously led a legal technology company through acquisition by LexisNexis. She teaches at Berkeley Law and is a Fellow at CodeX, the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics. She has authored several books on legal innovation and technology, delivered six TEDx talks, and her insights regularly appear in Forbes, Bloomberg Law, VentureBeat, TechCrunch, and Above the Law. Her work treats law as essential infrastructure, designed for how organizations actually operate.
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