If You Want to Kill a Plant, Have Two People Water It (The DRI Rule)
Every important cross-functional outcome needs one Directly Responsible Individual with real power
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 90%
At scale, everything that matters happens cross-functionally, and shared ownership guarantees failure — like a plant two friends water, it gets over-watered or never watered, and dies. The fix is a single Directly Responsible Individual (DRI) empowered to direct people across divisions they don't own.
Origin
Brian Halligan's 'haganism'; the DRI (Directly Responsible Individual) concept itself originates at Apple. Halligan observes every CEO at his 'adults table' becomes a zealot about it once they hit scale.
Core principles
- 01Committees never work; someone's individual accountability drives motivation that shared responsibility can't.
- 02The problem is invisible at small scale — when everyone's in one room, everyone knows what's happening.
- 03At scale, departments become silos and no one knows what the others are doing, so a single owner is required.
- 04The DRI must have power to tell people in other divisions what to do, even for work they don't formally own.
How to run it
- 1
Identify the cross-functional outcome
Name the important thing that spans departments — e.g. a scaled pilot process touching sales, services, product management, and engineering.
Watch out At small scale this feels unnecessary because everyone's already aligned in the room — the need only appears once you've built separate organizations.
- 2
Assign one DRI, not a committee
Put a single named person on the line for the goal or metric. Resist the intuition that two capable people collaborating will be even better.
Pro tip Having someone's 'ass on the line' creates motivation that diffusing responsibility across people destroys.
Watch out Splitting ownership between two people reliably produces the over-water/under-water failure — the outcome dies.
- 3
Give the DRI real cross-division power
Empower that individual to direct people in other divisions they don't own, since important work at scale is inherently cross-functional.
In the wild
When small, a pilot with a big account works because the salesperson, service person, and developer are all on the same page in the room. At scale, with separate sales, forward-deployed engineering, product, and dev orgs, no one knows what the others are doing — so a powerful DRI must own the redesigned pilot process end-to-end.
→ Cross-functional execution holds together at scale instead of falling into the gaps between siloed departments.
Common mistakes
Splitting ownership to 'be safe'
Putting two people on a goal feels like more coverage but produces the two-people-watering-a-plant outcome: over- or under-done work with no one accountable, and the initiative dies.
Assuming small-team alignment persists at scale
Because the failure is invisible until you have layers and silos, teams skip the DRI discipline early and get bitten only once they've grown — when it's harder to retrofit.
Is it for you?
Best for
CEOs and leaders whose companies are crossing ~100 employees and forming distinct departments.
Not ideal for
Tiny startups where everyone is already in one room and shares full context — the overhead isn't yet worth it.
From the transcript
“If you want to kill a plant, have two people water it.”
“Everything important happens crossf functionally inside a company at scale and you need someone powerful uh to own it.”
“Committees never work.”
From the episode
Sequoia CEO coach: Why it’s never been easier to start a company, and never been harder to scale one
Brian Halligan (co-founder, HubSpot)