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Management & Leadership vocabulary · Decision Making

Trade-off

Meaning in management & leadership, with examples

/ˈtreɪdɔːf/nounCommon term

In management & leadership, trade-off means: A situation where you accept less of one thing to get more of another, such as lower quality for faster delivery; also the balance you choose between the two.

In Turkish: ödünleşim, denge, bir şeyden ödün verme

How it is used

Common in decision-making and planning: 'What's the trade-off?' You make, accept or weigh a trade-off. Classic examples are time, cost and quality in projects, or speed and accuracy in decisions.

Example sentences

  1. There's a trade-off between launching early and fixing every bug.

  2. We accepted a small trade-off in quality to meet the client's deadline.

Common collocations

  • make a trade-off
  • accept a trade-off
  • the trade-off between
  • weigh the trade-offs
  • decision-makingThe process of choosing between different options, including collecting information, weighing risks and benefits, and agreeing who makes the final choice.
  • prioritizeTo decide which tasks or issues matter most and deal with them first, often because there is not enough time or money for everything.
  • risk assessmentThe process of identifying what could go wrong in a plan or activity, judging how likely and how serious each risk is, and deciding how to reduce it.
  • consensusGeneral agreement among all or most members of a group, reached through discussion, so that people can support a decision even if it was not their first choice.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Decision Making

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