TL;DR
DACI assigns four roles to every cross-team decision: a Driver who runs the process, a single Approver who makes the call, Contributors who provide expertise, and an Informed group that gets the outcome. One Approver. Always. That constraint alone eliminates most of the slow, looping discussions that kill product velocity.
What Is DACI?
DACI is a decision-making framework that maps every stakeholder to one of four roles before a decision starts. Atlassian popularized it internally and then published it as part of their Team Playbook, which is where most PMs first encounter it. Intuit, Asana, and similar product-forward companies run variations of the same model.
The problem DACI solves is familiar: a cross-team decision gets made in a meeting, then unmade in Slack, then re-litigated two weeks later because no one was clear on who had final authority. DACI short-circuits that loop by making accountability explicit before discussion begins.
It is not a meeting format. It is not a project management system. It is a lightweight role assignment that takes five minutes to document and saves hours of misalignment later.
The Four Roles
Driver
The Driver owns the decision process, not the decision itself. Their job is to gather input, set the timeline, organize the relevant meetings, and make sure the Approver has everything they need to decide.
One person is always the Driver. Usually the product manager, the team lead, or whoever raised the question. The Driver writes the decision brief, schedules Contributors, and closes the loop with the Informed group after the decision lands.
A good Driver keeps the process moving without substituting their own judgment for the Approver's. They are a coordinator and a writer, not a unilateral decision-maker.
Approver
The Approver makes the final call. One person. No exceptions.
This is the rule that makes DACI work. Committee approval sounds inclusive but produces watered-down decisions and diffused accountability. A single Approver can be wrong, but they can also be held accountable, which creates the conditions for better decisions over time.
The Approver should be the person whose team or budget is most affected by the outcome. For a pricing decision, that is usually the VP of Product or the CPO. For an infrastructure choice, it might be the Engineering Director. Seniority matters less than direct accountability for the outcome.
Contributors
Contributors are subject matter experts who provide input before the decision is made. They attend relevant discussions, review the decision brief, and share their perspective. They do not have veto power.
Finance, Engineering, Customer Success, Legal, Marketing. Any function with relevant expertise belongs here. The Driver decides which Contributors to include based on what the decision requires. More is not better. Invite the people whose knowledge is necessary, not everyone who might have an opinion.
Crucially, being a Contributor does not mean your recommendation will be followed. Contributors advise. The Approver decides.
Informed
Informed stakeholders receive the decision after it is made. They are not consulted beforehand. They do not participate in the process. They simply need to know the outcome so they can act on it.
Sales knowing about a feature sunset before it ships. The customer base learning via a blog post. The board understanding a strategic pivot. These are Informed audiences. Skipping this step creates the downstream confusion where people hear about decisions through informal channels and feel blindsided.
The Driver handles the Informed step. It is the last thing on the checklist before the decision is complete.
Worked Example: Should We Sunset the Free Tier?
This is the kind of decision that stalls for months without a clear framework. Too many teams have a stake in it. Here is how DACI structures it.
Decision: Sunset the free tier and move to a 14-day trial only model.
Why it matters: Free users represent 60% of active accounts but 4% of revenue. Support load is disproportionate. Sales has been asking for this change for two quarters.
DACI assignments:
| Role | Person |
|---|---|
| Driver | PM (Marketplace team) |
| Approver | VP Product |
| Contributors | Finance, Engineering Lead, Customer Success, Marketing |
| Informed | Sales team, Free-tier user base (via email + blog post) |
Timeline:
- Week 1: Driver writes a two-page decision brief covering current free-tier usage data, support cost estimates from Finance, migration path options from Engineering, and churn risk analysis from Customer Success.
- Week 2: Driver runs a 60-minute working session with Contributors. Each function presents their view. No decisions are made in the room.
- Week 3: Driver delivers a one-page recommendation summary to the Approver, including Contributors' dissenting views.
- Week 3 (end): Approver reviews asynchronously and schedules a 30-minute decision call with the Driver.
- Week 4: Approver decides. Driver notifies Sales with internal context. Marketing prepares the user-facing communication. Free-tier users receive an email with the migration offer 30 days before cutoff.
What DACI prevented here:
Without it, Sales might have pushed for the decision in a QBR, Customer Success might have blocked it in a meeting without a formal process, and Marketing might have learned about the sunset from a support ticket. The Approver would have received conflicting signals from every direction and kicked the decision to next quarter.
With DACI, everyone knew their role, the timeline was set in advance, and the Approver had one consolidated brief to react to. Decision made in three weeks.
DACI Template
For each decision, document the following before discussion begins. Keep it short. One page is enough.
Decision: [One sentence describing the choice to be made]
Due date: [When does this decision need to be made?]
Driver: [Name, role]
Approver: [Name, role]
Contributors: [Names, roles, what input they're providing]
Informed: [Groups, how they'll be notified]
Background: [2-3 sentences of context]
Options considered: [List the real alternatives, not just yes/no]
Recommendation: [Driver's suggested path, with rationale]
Open questions: [Anything the Approver needs to resolve]
Decision log: [Updated after the call with the outcome and date]The decision framework template and decision log template on IdeaPlan give you a ready-to-use version of this. The stakeholder alignment template pairs well for decisions that require broader org buy-in before the Approver call.
When to Use DACI
Use DACI when a decision has four or more stakeholders across different functions, when the outcome has medium-to-high reversibility cost (sunsetting a feature, changing pricing, hiring a key role), or when previous similar decisions have stalled or been relitigated.
Strategic product decisions. Cross-team alignment moments. Anything where you need a paper trail showing who was consulted and who decided.
The stakeholder map tool is useful here. Before writing your DACI brief, map out which teams have influence over the outcome and which just need to be kept in the loop. That map directly informs who becomes a Contributor vs who goes into the Informed bucket.
For managing the stakeholder communication after the decision, the stakeholder map template structures your outreach plan.
When NOT to Use DACI
Skip DACI for decisions a single team can make and reverse within a sprint. Bug fix prioritization. Copy changes. A/B test configuration. Sprint planning tradeoffs. These do not need a formal decision framework.
Also skip it when the answer is urgent and already obvious. If production is down, you do not hold a Contributors meeting. The on-call engineer decides and notifies everyone afterward.
DACI adds overhead. That overhead is worth it when the decision is expensive to undo, affects multiple teams, or needs a clear record. It is noise when the decision scope is small.
Common Pitfalls
Too many Approvers. This is the most common failure. A team designates two co-Approvers because neither wants to feel excluded. The result is committee paralysis where both people wait for the other to decide. One Approver. If two people truly must both approve, escalate to someone above them who can make the unified call.
A Driver who disappears. The Driver sets the process and then vanishes waiting for Contributors to self-organize. Without a Driver actively chasing input, moving deadlines, and writing the brief, the decision stalls. The Driver role requires active management, not just assignment.
Contributors who think they are Approvers. A Customer Success lead brings their manager to the Contributors meeting to apply pressure, or a Finance rep says "we won't approve this." Contributors advise. The Approver decides. The Driver needs to enforce this boundary early and clearly.
No Informed step. The decision gets made, the Approver and Driver move on, and Sales learns about the pricing change from a customer three weeks later. The Informed step is not optional. It is the last action item in every DACI process.
Documenting DACI but not following it. Some teams fill out the DACI template as a compliance exercise and then make the decision informally over Slack. The template is a tool, not a checkbox. If the process is not reflected in how the decision actually gets made, the template adds work without adding value.
For a structured approach to managing the stakeholder communication side, see the guide to stakeholder management.
DACI vs Alternatives
DACI vs RACI. The RACI matrix splits accountability into two roles: Responsible (does the work) and Accountable (owns the outcome). In project management, that distinction is useful. In product decision-making, it creates ambiguity. Who makes the final call when Responsible and Accountable disagree? DACI collapses that ambiguity by naming one Approver with explicit final authority. For decision-making specifically, DACI is cleaner. For task assignment across a project, RACI still has a place. See the RACI matrix template if you need task-level accountability alongside DACI.
DACI vs RAPID. RAPID (Recommend, Agree, Perform, Input, Decide) is similar in intent and adds an "Agree" role for people who must sign off before the decision proceeds. That extra role gives Legal and Finance a formal veto, which suits regulated industries. DACI is faster to run and easier to explain in a 5-minute meeting. Most product teams prefer DACI unless they operate in environments where formal cross-functional approval is mandatory.
DACI vs disagree-and-commit. Disagree-and-commit is a principle, not a process. It tells people how to behave after a decision is made but does not tell them who makes it. DACI and disagree-and-commit work well together: DACI clarifies who decides, and disagree-and-commit sets the expectation that Contributors who lost the argument still support the outcome.
Tools That Help
The stakeholder map tool helps you identify who belongs in each DACI role before you write the brief. Plotting stakeholders by influence and interest makes it obvious who should be an Approver, who should contribute, and who just needs a notification email.
For decisions that recur across planning cycles, the stakeholder communication plan template gives you a repeatable structure for the Informed step. This is particularly useful for quarterly roadmap decisions where the same groups need updates on the same cadence.
The internal stakeholder glossary entry covers the broader context of managing internal audiences, which directly informs how you staff the Informed group in complex organizations.
After your DACI decision is made, log it. A decision log is one of the most underused PM artifacts. It makes future decisions faster because you can reference what you decided, why, and who approved it.
Getting Started
Pick one decision your team is currently circling on without resolution. Write the DACI brief in one page. Name one Approver. List three to five Contributors. Set a due date. Send it to the Approver and ask for a 30-minute decision call next week.
That is it. The framework takes five minutes to apply. The hard part is enforcing the single Approver rule when everyone wants input. That discipline, more than any template or tool, is what makes DACI work.