What is the DACI framework?
Small teams rarely fail because they lack ideas.
They stall because nobody is sure who actually decides.
A pricing question sits in a chat thread for weeks.
A feature debate restarts every meeting.
Everyone has an opinion, but no one has the final call.
The DACI decision framework is a simple way to fix that.
It assigns four roles for any significant decision so the process has a driver, a decision maker, expert voices and a list of people to notify.
This guide explains what each role does, when the framework helps, and how to set one up with a worked example.
DACI is an acronym that breaks a decision into four roles.
According to Atlassian's Team Playbook, the letters stand for Driver, Approver, Contributors and Informed Atlassian Team Playbook.
The framework requires teams to define the roles and responsibilities of key stakeholders in a decision.
Here is what each letter means:
- Driver : the person responsible for corralling stakeholders, gathering the necessary information, defining the scope of the decision, and getting a decision made by the agreed date.
- Approver : the one person who makes the decision. Atlassian emphasizes that this is deliberately a single person, which turns the role from a passive rubber stamp into an active decision maker.
- Contributors : people with subject-area knowledge who can make recommendations. They have a voice, but not a vote.
- Informed : people whose work may be affected by the decision and should be told once it has been made. No vote, no voice.
The framework does not tell you what to decide.
It tells you who does what, so the decision can actually move.
DACI vs RACI: what is the difference?
You may have seen RACI, a related framework with Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed roles.
The practical difference is emphasis.
DACI separates the Driver, who pushes the decision forward, from the Approver, who makes it.
It is built specifically around decision-making rather than general task ownership.
For a small team, the distinction matters less than the principle: one person moves the process, one person owns the outcome, experts advise, and everyone else is told the result.
If your team already uses RACI for project work, DACI can sit alongside it for discrete decisions without replacing anything.