Four Roles, Zero Confusion: Mab.io’s Simplified RACI Model for PM Teams
The Puzzle of Responsibility
Ask any project manager why tasks stall, and you’ll hear familiar answers: deadlines slip, priorities shift, resources are stretched. But beneath the surface, another, quieter problem lurks — responsibility confusion.
Who exactly is in charge of moving a task forward? Who makes the final decision when disagreements arise? And how do teams balance the need for collaboration with the need for accountability?
These are not new questions. For decades, organizations have relied on frameworks to bring clarity to the messy world of shared work. The most famous of these is RACI: Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed.
Yet for all its popularity, RACI has often created as much confusion as it sought to eliminate.
The Legacy Solution: RACI Explained
The RACI framework was designed to clarify roles. Each task in a project would explicitly assign:
- Responsible: the person doing the work.
- Accountable: the person ultimately answerable for the outcome.
- Consulted: the experts or stakeholders whose input is required.
- Informed: those who need to be updated on progress.
In theory, this mapping should prevent ambiguity. A matrix of tasks and roles makes it clear who does what, who decides, and who simply observes.
On paper, it looks elegant. In practice, it often collapses under its own complexity.
Where RACI Breaks Down
There are three main ways RACI fails modern teams:
- Ambiguity of definitions.
Teams struggle to distinguish between “Responsible” and “Accountable.” In many cases, the same person is both — which makes the distinction meaningless. - Overhead of implementation.
Filling out RACI charts becomes its own task. Time spent mapping roles is time not spent doing the work. - Dilution of ownership.
By creating multiple categories of responsibility, RACI unintentionally distributes accountability. The more people share in being “responsible,” the less any one person feels compelled to act.
For slow-moving, hierarchical organizations, this complexity may be tolerable. But for fast-moving product teams, agencies, and startups, RACI often produces more friction than clarity.
The Mab.io Alternative: Four Fixed Roles
Mab.io begins with a provocative question: what if RACI is over-engineered?
Instead of four overlapping categories that teams interpret differently, Mab.io enforces four roles, hard-coded into the software:
- Owner. Creates the task, assigns the assignee, approves final work, and handles escalations.
- Assignee. Executes the work. Cannot approve, escalate, or reassign.
- Advisor. Provides input and requests revisions but cannot approve or complete.
- Follower. Observes, receives updates, and comments, but has no decision-making power.
That’s it. No additional categories, no customization, no exceptions.
At first glance, this may feel restrictive. But the clarity it creates is the point. Where RACI asks teams to negotiate distinctions, Mab.io enforces them automatically.
Why Four Roles Work: The Incentive Logic
From an organizational design perspective, Mab.io’s roles create cleaner incentive structures.
- Owners are incentivized to ensure completion because their role explicitly includes final approval. They cannot abdicate responsibility.
- Assignees are incentivized to focus on execution, knowing they won’t be pulled into approval debates.
- Advisors contribute expertise but cannot derail accountability by assuming decision power.
- Followers remain informed without generating noise, which prevents the “too many cooks” problem.
By reducing the number of roles and sharply limiting what each can do, Mab.io minimizes negotiation costs. There’s no debate about who is “responsible” versus “accountable” — the system itself enforces those boundaries.
A Product Launch Example
Imagine a team preparing to launch a new feature.
In a traditional RACI approach:
- The Responsible role is split between two engineers.
- The Accountable role is assigned to the product manager.
- The designer is Consulted.
- Marketing is Informed.
On paper, this looks fine. But when issues arise, the Responsible engineers disagree. The designer escalates feedback that conflicts with the product manager’s view. The project stalls as everyone re-interprets their RACI assignments.
In Mab.io’s four-role model:
- Owner: Product Manager.
- Assignee: Engineer.
- Advisor: Designer.
- Follower: Marketing lead.
Now the flow is simple. The engineer builds. The designer advises. The product manager approves. Marketing is kept in the loop. If disagreements arise, the Owner resolves them. The baton moves forward.
The difference is subtle in theory but dramatic in practice: tasks keep moving because responsibility cannot be diluted.
Addressing the Criticism
Critics argue that Mab.io is too rigid. They point out that complex tasks often involve multiple contributors, and forcing a single owner may oversimplify reality.
But this critique misses an important truth: collaboration and accountability are not the same thing.
Yes, a marketing campaign may involve designers, copywriters, and analysts. But someone always has the final say. Someone always bears responsibility for success or failure. The notion of “shared accountability” sounds inclusive but is rarely true in practice.
Mab.io’s model doesn’t eliminate collaboration. Owners can create subtasks for contributors, or consult advisors for input. What it eliminates is the illusion that accountability can be shared.
The Broader Implications for Teams
The implications of this approach extend beyond any single task.
- Reduced friction. Teams spend less time negotiating roles and more time executing.
- Predictability. Workflows become standardized, which lowers coordination costs.
- Trust. Clear ownership builds confidence that nothing will be dropped.
- Remote resilience. Distributed teams, where hallway conversations don’t exist, benefit especially from enforced clarity.
From an economic perspective, Mab.io reduces the transaction costs of collaboration. Instead of negotiating who is responsible in each case, the system sets defaults that everyone follows.
RACI vs. Mab.io: A Strategic Shift
RACI emerged in an era of hierarchical organizations where roles were broad, projects were long, and clarity was achieved through documentation.
Mab.io reflects the needs of modern teams: fast-moving, distributed, and overloaded with digital communication. In this environment, complex frameworks create bottlenecks. Simpler, stricter systems are more effective.
This is part of a broader trend: the rise of opinionated frameworks. Agile sprints, OKRs, even Linear’s minimalist workflow rules all reflect the same principle: teams perform better when the system removes choices that don’t add value.
From Complexity to Clarity
The puzzle of responsibility has haunted teams for decades. RACI was an attempt to solve it with more categories. Mab.io’s answer is to solve it with fewer.
By locking every participant into one of four sharply defined roles, Mab.io enforces clarity where other systems allow confusion.
The lesson is simple: in project management, as in economics, clarity beats complexity. And sometimes, the best framework is the one that removes choices.