Decision Engineering

Senior engineers are expected to make consequential technical choices: what to build, what to buy, which technologies to adopt, and which to retire. And many of these decisions have been radically affected by the use of AI in products and as part of the product development life cycle. Decision Engineering gives you a repeatable process for making those choices—from defining the problem and comparing alternatives to building agreement and putting the decision into practice. Drawing on his experience as an engineer, architect, manager, and CTO, Grygoriy Gonchar shows you how to connect business needs to technical choices and explain their trade-offs to engineers, product teams, and leadership.

As AI-assisted development makes code easier to produce, deciding what deserves to be built becomes even more important. Whether you’re evaluating a vendor, choosing an open-source solution, or weighing build versus buy, you’ll learn to gather evidence, compare costs and risks, and make a reasoned choice under time, budget, and organizational constraints.

Tech stack agnostic, you’ll learn how to translate business and non-functional requirements into concrete trade-offs around cost, risk, revenue impact, uptime, and compliance. The book walks you through the full framework of making a decision, from framing the problem and gathering requirements, to evaluating options, choosing, documenting, and executing. You’ll apply structured tools like cost–benefit analysis without overengineering the process, and make build-versus-buy calls using realistic assessments. Along the way, you’ll see how to document your decisions so they stay transparent and useful, even as your systems and teams evolve.

The book is grounded in real-world examples you might face in industry, from a customer support AI agent to choosing a data ingestion solution and deciding on a design system library. Each example illustrates how to reason under uncertainty, how to counter the cognitive biases that distort technical judgment, and how to handle disagreement in a way that produces better outcomes.