Four letters that prevent chaos

Most project failures are not technical. They are accountability failures. Two people assume they own the same decision. A key task stalls because nobody was clearly assigned to act. A stakeholder finds out about a major change in a client meeting instead of a team update.

RACI exists to fix this. It gives every task in a project exactly one answer to four questions: who does it, who owns it, who should you ask before shipping it, and who needs to know when it is done.

Meet the FlareTag team working on the Custom Template Builder launch: Amara (Product Manager), Dev (Lead Engineer), Lola (Designer), Chidi (Marketing Lead), and Sade (Customer Success Lead). FlareTag helps event organisers and community managers create personalised badge templates. Participants get a link, fill in their details, and download their badge without needing a designer. This new feature lets organisers build their own templates from scratch.

Who does the work

A task can have more than one R, but the more you add, the more coordination overhead you create. For the task "Design badge template UI", Lola is R. Dev is also R for building the front-end component once Lola hands off designs. Two Rs work here because their contributions are sequential and clearly distinct.

But if you put five people as R on the same deliverable, you will spend more time coordinating than executing. Be deliberate about who is actually doing the work.

Who owns the outcome

There is only ever one A per task. This is the one rule in RACI that should never be broken. For "Design badge template UI", Amara is A. Dev and Lola are doing the work, but Amara is the one in the stakeholder meeting explaining why the feature shipped late.

One A per task. One clear decision maker. One escalation path. One throat to grab when things go wrong.

Who needs to weigh in before it ships

For the template editor, Sade is C. She runs the beta community and knows exactly where users get confused. When Lola sends over mockups for review, Sade's feedback on labelling and flow shapes the final design.

The trap here is the Consulted dump: marking every stakeholder as C on every task because it feels inclusive. If Chidi, Sade, and three others are all C on a basic engineering task, you have created five approval dependencies where you needed zero. Consult the people whose input will genuinely change the output.

Who needs to know, not decide

Chidi is I on the template editor build. He is not making design decisions or writing code. But he needs to know the ship date so he can time the launch email, coordinate social posts, and brief the sales team.

Marking Chidi as C here would be a mistake. It would pull him into design reviews that have nothing to do with his work and slow down the engineering team waiting for his sign-off.

The FlareTag Custom Template Builder matrix

Here is what the RACI matrix looks like for the core tasks in the FlareTag launch. Notice that Amara holds A on every task because she is the PM. Sade carries a heavy R load for documentation and beta, which is realistic for a customer success lead on a product launch. Chidi is I on most tasks until the launch announcement, where he becomes R.

The three RACI traps

See the FlareTag matrix in the Planner

Load the example below to see the full team, all six tasks, and every RACI assignment populated in the Planner. Explore the Dashboard to see the stacked chart and KPIs with real data.

This will overwrite any data currently in the Planner.