Turn data stakeholders into owners with RACI and prevent drive-by requirements
How a simple matrix stops scope creep, silences random requests, and gives your team clarity
I didn’t have a manager. No PM either. Just me, a pile of requests, and random people popping up in my inbox asking about progress.
One day I’d get a green light from a stakeholder. A week later, their boss would show up and tell me the thing I built wasn’t even close to what they needed.
And then, mid-project “surprises.” Someone new would drop in with the actual requirements, and suddenly my roadmap was on fire.
I thought the problem was scope creep. Or bad communication. Or maybe just bad luck.
But it wasn’t. Or at least, it wasn’t the whole problem.
The real problem was that nobody knew who actually owned what.
The pain of drive-by requirements
If you’ve worked on data projects long enough, you’ve met the drive-by stakeholder.
They swing in with a request, drop it on your desk, and vanish. A week later, someone else shows up with “one small change.”
By the end of the month, you’re on version five of a project nobody seems to fully own.
For me, this looked like:
A VP asking for a dashboard but never planning to use it.
A senior manager swooping in after weeks of work and saying, “This isn’t what we need.”
A random teammate forwarding me a request mid-project because they were the real end user.
The result was confusion, wasted hours, and a team that kept asking, “Why are we even doing this?”
That’s when it hit me:
Requirements are not the problem. Ownership is.
Finding RACI
When I finally got tired of chasing moving targets, I did what any desperate data pro would do. I googled.
Buried between project management blogs and consulting jargon, I found something called the RACI matrix.
At first, it looked like another useless framework. Four letters. Four roles. Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed. Sounded corporate.
But the more I read, the more it clicked. This wasn’t about adding process. It was about making ownership obvious.
So I tried it. No slides. No giant spreadsheet. I just started asking three questions the next time a project landed on my des.
Stakeholders didn’t even notice I was running a framework on them. They just felt heard.
My team finally knew why they were doing something. And for the first time in a long time, I didn’t feel like I was building blind.
The basics
RACI looks fancy on paper, but it boils down to four roles. Once you see them in action, it’s impossible to unsee.
Responsible
This is the person who actually does the work.
If we’re building a pipeline, it’s the engineer writing SQL or setting up ETL. If we’re shipping a dashboard, it’s the analyst pulling queries and designing charts.
There can be more than one Responsible, but the key is they’re the hands on the keyboard. They don’t sign off, they deliver.