The RACI matrix, tuned for small teams: stop asking “who owns this?”

Every team has a meeting that ends with "so… who's actually doing this?" The RACI matrix is the one-page cure: every recurring decision, four letters, one name per letter. Thirty minutes to build, and it saves an hour a week for as long as the team exists.

The full template with the worked example is on our ops notes.

The four letters, with the small-team corrections

Textbook RACI fails quietly in a team under twenty, because nobody has exactly one job. The corrections:

• R — Responsible (does the work). Exactly one name. Never a team, never "marketing". If two people are genuinely both doing it, it's two rows.
• A — Accountable (owns the outcome). One person, and a person. On small teams A and R may be the same human for most rows — that's not a violation, it's speed.
• C — Consulted (input before). Two-way and time-boxed. A name on C owes an opinion by a date; a C that never answers becomes an I.
• I — Informed (told after). One-way, batched, no veto. If being informed feels bad, they should have been C — and C has a deadline.

The table

Five columns: decision (a noun phrase a new hire understands), R (one name), A (one name), C (max 3), I (short list). Twenty to forty rows covering the decisions where ownership fog costs real days: pricing, incident severity calls, vendor renewals, publishes, purchases.

The four failure modes

1. Two Rs — the split-brain row. Neither does the work; the deadline splits in half instead of the work.
2. No A — the orphan decision. No arbiter when the Rs disagree; it lives in a chat thread until someone senior notices.
3. C-spam — everyone consulted, nothing ships. Every courtesy costs a day. C list maxes at three, each with a reply-by date.
4. The missing I — the ambush. "Why did I find out from a customer?" Walk the list of people downstream of the decision and name them.

The 90-second test

Pick any row: if this stalls today, whose name do I call? One name = alive. "Depends" = it's two rows. "The founder" = it's a delegation waiting to happen.

Worked example

A fifteen-person SaaS product team: launch decisions took eleven days from "should we ship" to actually deciding, because every launch reopened the argument about who could say yes. One afternoon with the matrix — forty-one rows, nine with two Rs, six with no A, C lists averaging 5.5 names (one row consulted the whole company channel). They capped every C list at three with reply-by dates, named one A per row, merged the duplicate Rs. Next month: launch decisions in under 24 hours, and the founder stopped appearing in four threads a week.

The full page — including the three touchpoints that keep the matrix alive (project kickoffs, quarterly dead-name scans, post-incident additions) and the three metrics — is at hive80lab ops notes. If you want the whole ownership system audited and built for your estate, that's the Small-Team Ops Audit ($149), and the free Security Audit Scorecard scores your estate in 45 checks in your browser.