Decision Rights Matrix: Who Decides What in a Small Company

Start with friction, not completeness. Ask your leadership team to write down the last ten decisions that took too long, got reversed or caused an argument about whose call it was. Group them into a short list of recurring decision types.

Typical entries for a small company:

• Hiring and firing: opening a role, choosing a finalist, setting an offer.
• Spending: approving a new vendor, a purchase above a set amount, a budget change.
• Pricing and discounts: changing list price, approving a discount outside the normal range.
• Customers: accepting a nonstandard contract, giving a refund or credit, firing a customer.
• Product and delivery: changing scope, delaying a launch, choosing a technology.
• Policy: changing a company rule or a benefit.

Aim for fifteen to twenty rows. If you list a hundred, nobody will read it. Anything rare can be handled by asking.

Use a simple set of roles, and insist on exactly one person in the deciding role. If two people share the decision, then neither owns it.

1. Decider: the single person who makes the call and answers for it.
2. Recommender: the person who does the analysis and proposes an answer, often the one closest to the work.
3. Consulted: people who must be asked before the decision, because they have information or will be affected. Their advice is heard, but they don't hold a veto.
4. Informed: people told afterward, so they aren't surprised.

If you've used a RACI chart, this is similar but tighter: the accountable person and the person who does the work are separated from the person who decides, and there's a strict limit of one decider. The RACI chart template shows the difference in more detail. Bain's RAPID model (Recommend, Agree, Perform, Input, Decide) is another variant, and it adds an "Agree" role for people with a real veto, which you should use sparingly.

Suppose your operations lead, finance lead, sales lead and CEO keep colliding over the same issues. You put four rows in the matrix.

For a new vendor under a spend limit the operations lead sets, say $5,000 a year, the operations lead decides, finance is consulted and the CEO is informed. Above that limit, finance decides after operations recommends, and the CEO is informed. For a customer discount beyond the standard range, the sales lead recommends, finance is consulted on margin and the CEO decides. For a delivery date change that affects a customer commitment, operations decides and sales is informed.

Notice what the tiers do. Tying the decider to a spend or risk threshold means most decisions are made at the lowest level that can bear the consequences, and only the unusual ones climb.

A matrix without a clock still stalls. Attach a time-box to each decision type: for example, routine spend gets two business days, a customer exception gets one day and a hiring offer gets three. If the decider hasn't decided when the time is up, the decision goes to the next person up the chain, who either decides or gives the original decider a firm extension.

Write the rule where everyone can see it, and apply it to yourself too. Founders are the most common bottleneck, so consider a rule that a decision waiting on the CEO for more than a set number of days is approved by default when the risk is low and the recommender has documented the reasoning. That transfers responsibility to where the information is.

Time-boxes also make disagreement cheaper: people can commit and revisit if the facts change, instead of debating indefinitely.

Publish it in a place people already use: your wiki, a shared doc or a work management tool, and link to it from the channels where decisions get made. Pair it with a simple decision log, one line per significant decision with the date, the decider and the reasoning, so people can see precedent instead of relitigating.

Review the matrix quarterly. Ask three questions: which decisions caused conflict this quarter, which rows nobody used and which thresholds have become too low or too high as the company grew. Update it, date the change and tell people. Notion is a common place to hold the matrix and the log, and Asana can carry approval tasks that route to the right decider. For choosing a wiki, Notion vs Slite vs Confluence is a good comparison, and Asana vs Monday vs ClickUp covers the task side.