“High-quality decision making and strong performance go hand in hand. Yet, in many companies, even clear, well framed decisions can be derailed by uncertainty over roles and responsibilities…When the roles involved in decisions are clearly delineated, teams and organisations make the right choices—swiftly and effectively.” - Bain & Company, “RAPID®: Bain's tool to clarify decision accountability”
A key skill of a Product Manager or Product Leader is to establish good working relationships between individuals of cross-functional teams. Effective cross-functional collaboration can mean the difference between a successful and a failed quarter. Understanding levels of responsibility and accountability for delivery of tasks or input into decisions is key to efficient delivery and good outcomes.
Your colleagues are likely people who don’t report to you, don’t sit in the same organisation, and may have differing goals and priorities. They might not be incentivised to contribute to the success of your quarter, nor may their leaders be directing them to align with your needs.
The flip side might be also true: you have colleagues who want to see and participate in everything you do - which is great in terms of participation but potentially creates inefficiency, makes it unclear who is responsible for what, and slows you down.
In both cases you need to know when to involve people in decisions and when not to.
In this article we will take you through three accountability frameworks, which give you a powerful toolkit:
- RAPID: for bigger choices
- RACI: for simpler tasks, goals and deliverables
- 7 Levels of Delegation: to define roles and responsibilities with your closest colleagues
What are RAPID / RACI / 7 Levels of Delegation?
RAPID
RAPID is a structured decision making framework which helps clarify roles decision making, and provides a framework by which decisions can be documented. It helps clarify what you need from whom and is useful for bigger, more complex decisions by grouping people into a task force with different levels of information input and responsibility. It is similar to a framework like DECIDE.
Ironically it’s not intended for rapid decision making, such as when 1 individual can make the decision, or the decision making itself is relatively simple. It’s for more complex, riskier decisions where multiple people need to be involved. It helps streamline a complex decision making process to avoid too many repetitive loops or multiple individuals feeling they have to contribute when the reality is that their input isn’t critical.
RACI
RACI on the other hand is a framework for agreeing goals and tasks, where you define the level of collaboration between you and others.
The goal of RACI is to clarify who does what, and with how much input from others. This could span from tactical project tasks like who adds metatags to web content, to how roles like Engineering Managers, Tech Leads and Product Managers work together more broadly to achieve their goals.
RACI can be applied in most situations, and is particularly good when you are clarifying roles and responsibilities for tasks or deliverables that come up on a regular basis. If you’re in any doubt about which accountability framework to use, choose RACI.
7 Levels of Delegation
7 Levels of Delegation is a more graduated scale of roles and responsibilities that RACI. It’s particularly effective for clarifying how you work with a very close colleague (e.g you manager or tech counterpart) on a 1:1 basis.
7 Levels of Delegation maps tasks on a 7 point scale which covers a spectrum of input from you and the other person. This is a very powerful way of clarifying how you’re going to work together, and make sure that you have a healthy and trust-based relationship with your closest colleague or two.
As a heavier weight framework than RACI, it’s best suited to the closest 1-2 relationships you have at work, and you probably don’t want to use it for larger groups.
Understanding decision types and how to apply the right framework
Jeff Bezos famously divided all decisions into two types:
- ‘Type 1’ (irreversible, should be made slowly)
- ‘Type 2’ (can be reversed, should be made quickly)
RACI and 7 Degrees of Delegation are more suited to the “Type 2” decisions and can facilitate a culture of high velocity decision making. Type 2 decisions are those that come up on a regular basis, are easily reversed and should be made quickly.
Neither RACI or 7 Levels of Delegation are suited to Type 1 decisions though, which need to be made slowly, after significant deliberation, and with high degrees of alignment with others. For these, you want to use RAPID, which is design specifically for Type 1 decisions, and is particularly effective when combined with a decision making process like DECIDE.
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Why use an accountability framework?
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Some key benefits of accountability frameworks include:
- Clarifies roles and responsibilities - Avoids stress and confusion around who does what. Particularly important around final accountability for decisions and tasks.
- Improves communication - Formalises boundaries and hand-offs reducing the likelihood of misunderstandings or information gaps.
- Resolves conflict - Facilitates constructive conversations about contentious areas.
- Reduces risk - Helps identify potential gaps or overlaps in responsibilities, reducing the risk of tasks being overlooked or duplicated.
- Increases efficiency - Assigns roles and responsibilities clearly, so you can streamline decision-making processes and workflow.
- Increases accountability - Clearly designates who is ultimately accountable for the success of a task or project, which can help prevent finger-pointing or ambiguity about who is in charge.
Ultimately, it allows you to create high-trust, efficient and effective cross-functional teams, who are more likely to mitigate failure, avoid wasted work and have fun while achieving what they set out to do.
When to apply accountability frameworks
There are many possible situations in which these frameworks can be deployed. They can be used for small tasks ad-hoc between two individuals, or run as a team exercise to determine longer term responsibilities.
Examples of where frameworks can be deployed:
- Agreeing how you work with a close colleague – for example how you work with you manager, your tech or design counterpart
- Agreeing who does what within a team – for example who is responsible for different parts of the product delivery process, and regular team meetings and activities.
- Agreeing ownership between teams – for example when it’s clear that there is misalignment or unclarity around owned KPIs
- Making it clear who the decision maker is – for example in situations where multiple teams or people are impacted by a decision, it can be unclear who should take the final call.
- Delivering a project – for example launching a new product, such as adding a jobs board to a training website
- Achieving a goal – for example increasing conversion from blog to main site 10% in a quarter
- Managing a process – for example SEO collaboration between marketing and product
Frameworks are often most effective when roles and responsibilities are unclear – for example in fast-growth organisations where new people are joining regularly, or small companies where roles are ill-defined.
It’s worth always remembering that different organisations and different teams have different perspectives on who is responsible for what. You need to work through these frameworks for your own team, you can’t just pull roles and responsibilities off-the-shelf.
The below survey demonstrates that even within a single sector there’s widespread divergence between who owns which KPIs. If you don’t ask this question explicitly in your own organization, it’s not going to be clear if there’s agreement or not. Being alert to the fact that there are likely grey areas helps prevent things falling through the cracks.
Results from a recent Growth Unhinged survey on which team owns which KPI in B2B SaaS companies (1000 companies from pre-seed to $50m+ ARR)
How to apply frameworks successfully
It’s important everyone involved is bought-in to the principles of applying a framework like RACI or 7 Levels of Delegation. The way to secure this is to make sure everyone understands the benefits of spending the time up-front to avoid tension and inefficiency down the line. It should create a huge sense of calm and alignment for the task ahead for everyone involved.
Align on the goal
Talk transparently to your colleagues about why you think reviewing roles and responsibilities is necessary. It’s fine to use phrases like ‘We obviously need to collaborate to achieve our goal, but I’m not sure where you would step in versus me’. Ultimately you’re proposing a process which will benefit all parties.
Do it collaboratively
Set up a 1 hour collaborative session with your colleagues to map and assign degrees of input over tasks and decisions associated with a given feature or goal using your method of choice. Be collaborative throughout, even when it comes to keeping final documents up to date. This is a process you run, and by clearly owning the process and the administration around it, you reduce the potential for pushback or friction with other busy colleagues.
Win over naysayers
If someone sees the process as an unnecessary headache, book a follow up where you have mapped out all tasks and assigned them to the ones you think they own. Seeing something written down will force them to edit and collaborate.
Make it fun
If you’re defining responsibilities between several roles for a long time (e.g. PM / designer /analyst / engineers in product teams) you’ll want to make sure that everyone has put enough thought into the exercise for it to stick. You can do this by running workshops to educate and inform and playing games like Delegation Poker (see below).
Define rules of engagement up-front
Make sure you create a space where people are encouraged to listen to each other and everyone is given a voice. Ideally you can review roles and responsibilities, timelines for delivery and KPIs before they are set in stone. Calm people by letting them know that iterations can occur later on so long as everything which needs to get done still gets done.
Document the process
It is key that the process involves structured documentation and ongoing management as things change. If it’s not kept live and centrally, it won’t exist:
- Keep the document in a central place everyone can access: Github, Gdocs, Company intranet, Notion, other project management tools used by the organisation. Try to meet people where they are - so if everyone uses Github, use Github.
- Update the document when changes occur: it has to be a living document to be effective. Continuing to iterate and adapt it will ensure it remains current for people.
- Reference the document in relevant meetings: Keep the document top of mind by routinely referring back to the designated responsibilities, especially in early phases of using the framework.
- Apply the framework in write ups of other documents: Consistently noting who does what on PRDs and reviewing with the team will help people fulfil and stick to their roles.
