In a highly collaborative and fast-paced environment, assign explicit ownership for every feature, no matter how small. The goal isn't to assign blame for failures but to empower individuals with the agency to make decisions, build consensus, and see their work through to completion.

If two people are responsible for watering a plant, it dies from either overwatering or neglect. This is why scaling companies must be zealous about assigning a single Directly Responsible Individual (DRI) for every key initiative. Shared ownership means no ownership, especially for cross-functional projects.

To combat diffused responsibility, starting a committee at Coinbase requires explicit CEO or COO approval. This forces the assignment of a single "Directly Responsible Individual" (DRI), ensuring clear ownership, accountability, and faster decision-making.

To combat slow decision-making from having too many stakeholders, Robinhood reorganized from functional departments to business units led by General Managers. This structure puts product, engineering, compliance, and operations on the same team, streamlining ownership and accelerating progress.

When a project stagnates, it's often because "everyone's accountable, which means no one's accountable." To combat this diffusion of responsibility, assign one "single-threaded owner" who is publicly responsible for reporting progress and triaging issues. This clarity, combined with assigning individual names to action items, fosters true ownership.

In M&A integration, ambiguity is the enemy. Brad Jacobs' "throat to choke" principle ensures extreme accountability by assigning every single task, no matter how small, to one specific individual with a firm deadline. This prevents tasks from falling through the cracks and clarifies ownership across thousands of line items.

The primary bottleneck to organizational speed isn't how fast individuals work; it's decision latency—the time it takes for decisions to be made and flow through the organization. This stems from unclear decision rights, poor communication, or lack of empowerment. Reducing this latency is the key to accelerating engineering and overall business velocity.

As teams grow, ambiguity over ownership increases, causing key tasks to be dropped. The RACI model (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) combats this by clarifying roles upfront for any project, ensuring clear ownership and preventing the diffusion of responsibility that paralyzes larger groups.

A product leader's job is not to synthesize opinions until everyone agrees, which leads to slow progress. Instead, they must create clarity by taking broad input but ensuring a single, accountable owner makes the final decision. Committees optimize for safety, not outcomes.