Main idea

A clear decision makes responsibility visible: it exposes whoever arbitrates, offers a grip for criticism, forces you to stand behind the requests that weren't kept. A soft decision dilutes that responsibility among the participants, the meetings, the documents and the successive validations. The same reflex exists in a durable version, written into the org chart.

Cutting product responsibility in two — someone designs upstream, someone carries through to release — produces exactly that dilution: one person bears the consequences of arbitrations they didn't make, another makes arbitrations whose consequences they will never see. Neither is in a position to answer for the whole.

The arrangement is comfortable for everyone, and that is why it persists. It is also why nobody is really accountable for anything anymore.

Why it matters

This links an org chart split to a decision practice: what an organization does in its meetings, it ends up installing in its structure.

And it gives a simple test on a given scope: ask who, alone, could have said no. If the answer is "nobody", the dilution is already in place.

Nuances and limits

The separation between whoever decides and whoever bears the outcome isn't always avoidable: an investment decision commits teams that didn't make it, and no organization works otherwise.

What is at stake here is narrower: the cut inside one and the same product scope, where nothing prevented keeping the decision and its consequence together.

Open questions

• On a scope shared between several teams, how do you assign the consequence of an arbitration without recreating a purely nominal responsibility?