Input into a decision — customer feedback, research, data, stakeholder opinions, engineering constraints, sales insight — should be gathered as broadly as possible. Accountability for the final call, however, must rest with one singular, named owner.
"Input should be really broad but accountability must be singular." — Blagoja Golubovski
Conflating the two is what turns decision-making into a committee: when the group that supplies input is also the group that decides by consensus, no one is answerable for the outcome. See Product Democracy: Consensus Decision-Making as Anti-Pattern.
If you can't name who made the call, there was no decision — just a diffusion of responsibility. Pairs with the Three-Level Decision Framework (Strategic / Product / Execution): broad input feeds every level, but the single decision-owner changes depending on the level.
Worth being explicit about: the singular-decision-owner model isn't a top-down/bottom-up argument in disguise. It separates participation (voice, the right to challenge and be heard) from ownership (who actually makes the call) — the two aren't in tension. See Disagree and Commit for the norm that makes this separation stick after the decision is made.
Из тем: The Product Operating Model