Clear ownership beats consensus for execution speed

Being very clear that whoever is accountable for the results should also be the decider. I found that a lot of literature out there says that product teams should be this communal best ideas come from everywhere group, which I think is well-intentioned and absolutely everyone should contribute ideas, but I think not having it be super clear who is accountable and who is deciding often slows down execution a lot.

DRI stands for "Directly Responsible Individual" - the single person designated as the final decision-maker for a project or initiative.

Once that person makes the call, it's disagree and commit time. There's no escalation path. If you're not the DRI and you're on the team and they made the call, all right. It's time to sign up and go forward on that decision.

No more than three reviews on a given piece of work where people are blocking one approver. If a meeting has more than 10 people on it, we ask the person hosting the meeting to kick out the other people and write better decision notes.

We got really aggressive about, functionally, who is in charge and at what level for a given review, and pushed to say to actually have limits on the number of people per meeting, on the number of sub-task reviews for a given body of work. What this did is it created a lot more agency and pace within given working teams.

If everyone has an understanding of why we're doing this, what problem we're solving, then people can make really great decisions. It's the only way you can really scale.