Accountable Equals Decider
Whoever owns the result owns the decision — everything else is a communal slowdown
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 90%
Aluwi's highest-leverage small change to Gojek's product development process: make it explicit that the person accountable for a result is also the decider. He accepts the well-intentioned 'best ideas come from anywhere' norm for idea generation, but argues that leaving decision rights ambiguous is what actually drags execution.
Origin
Introduced by Kevin Aluwi at Gojek as a deliberate correction to the prevailing product-management literature, which he characterises as promoting communal, everyone-decides product teams.
Core principles
- 01Contribution and decision are different rights. Everyone gets the first; one person gets the second.
- 02The decider must be the person who carries the consequence of the result.
- 03'Best ideas come from everywhere' is well intentioned and true — and is not a decision-making model.
- 04Ambiguity about who decides is a bigger execution tax than a wrong decision.
- 05This is a cheap, small change with outsized impact on velocity.
How to run it
- 1
Identify who carries the result
For each product decision area, name the single person whose outcome metric moves if this goes wrong.
- 2
Grant that person decision rights explicitly
State out loud and in writing that this person is the decider for this decision. Not the loudest voice, not consensus, not the most senior person passing through.
Watch out Do not split it — accountable-but-not-deciding is the exact configuration that stalls teams.
- 3
Keep idea generation fully open
Everyone should contribute ideas; that norm stays. Clarifying who decides is what makes the open idea flow usable rather than paralysing.
Pro tip Say this explicitly when you introduce the change, or the team will read it as centralisation and stop contributing.
In the wild
Asked for a minor recent change with outsized impact on execution, Aluwi named making it unambiguous who the decider was for any given product development decision — an explicit break from the literature telling product teams to operate as a communal, ideas-from-everywhere group.
→ Aluwi says Gojek's execution improved significantly after the switch.
Common mistakes
Letting 'best ideas come from everywhere' become 'everybody decides'
Aluwi calls the communal-team norm well intentioned and endorses open idea contribution — but treating idea equality as decision equality is what slows execution.
Separating accountability from decision rights
If the person on the hook for the result cannot make the call, they will wait, escalate, or hedge. The mismatch, not the decision quality, is the drag.
Is it for you?
Best for
Product leaders whose teams generate ideas well but ship slowly, where reviews spiral and no one can point to who actually decided
Not ideal for
Genuinely irreversible, company-betting decisions that warrant collective deliberation, or very small teams where the decider is already obvious
From the transcript
“whoever is accountable for the result should also be the design the decider”
“not having it be super clear who is accountable and and who is deciding often slows down execution a lot”
From the episode
Taxi mafias, cash vaults, and 100% MoM growth: The story behind Southeast Asia’s biggest startup
Kevin Aluwi (Gojek)