May 6, 2026
Hey Everyone,
Claire Hughes Johnson helped scale Stripe from 160 people to over 7,000 as COO. One of her clearest pieces of advice for growing companies:
"When you're hitting friction or are blocked, it is not weakness or failure. It is how to make the system better."
That advice is worth taking seriously because the default at most companies is the opposite. Escalating issues creates stigma, so many projects and decisions become blocked and stalled.
A McKinsey survey of over 1,200 executives found that leaders judge 58% of their decision-making time as poorly spent, and that decisions with no owner, deadline, or clear path upward are a major reason why.
Here's how to fix that with a system you can set up this week.
How the fastest companies treat escalation
The person who is blocked is usually not the person who can unblock them. Without a pre-agreed path, each stuck decision requires a fresh negotiation about who should make the call.
The fix is simpler than you'd expect. The companies that move fastest on decisions all did the same thing: they made escalation a built-in part of how work gets done.
Coinbase assigns a DRI (Directly Responsible Individual) to every decision and deliverable. CEO Brian Armstrong wrote that a single decision-maker helps the company move fast and push decisions down through the organization. The DRI collects input from legal, finance, and engineering, but one person makes the final call. If two DRIs disagree, both write up their perspective and take it to their shared manager together.
At Netflix, every significant decision has what they call an "informed captain" — one person responsible for the call. Their culture memo states that silent disagreement is unacceptable. Before major decisions, executives rate their support on a scale from -10 to +10. Disagreement becomes visible before the meeting, not after the decision ships.
Hughes Johnson's approach at Stripe uses the "common node." You don't go to the CEO. You go to the lowest-level manager that both sides report to, with both perspectives written down. That keeps the escalation fast and gives the decider enough context to make a good call.
All of these share the same structure of one named decider, a written context before the conversation, and a pre-agreed path, so nobody has to invent one under pressure.
Set this up for your team
Start with a one-page DACI doc (Driver, Approver, Contributors, Informed) for any decision that involves more than one team. Atlassian publishes a free template that takes about 10 minutes to fill in:
- The Driver gathers the information.
- The Approver makes the final call.
- Contributors give input.
- Everyone else is Informed after the decision is made.
Add two rules on top:
- Set a response deadline (five business days works well for non-urgent decisions)
- Agree that if the deadline passes without a response, the Driver can treat silence as consent and move forward.
That single rule eliminates the most common failure mode, where decisions stay open because nobody says yes or no.
Try this today
Pick one decision that's been stuck for more than a week. Write down who the Driver is, who the Approver is, and when you need an answer by. Send it to both of them today.
We built a free decision log template you can start using right now.
To edit, click File → Make a copy (in Google Sheets) or File → Download (to use locally).
Add one row per open decision, and review the log at the start of your weekly meeting. Any decision open longer than two weeks gets a forced choice: decide, kill, or escalate.
Go deeper
👉 Coinbase: How Coinbase uses DRIs (Directly Responsible Individuals) – Brian Armstrong on why single decision-makers speed up execution and how Coinbase avoids consensus-based decisions
👉 Atlassian: DACI Decision-Making Framework – a free template for assigning decision roles across teams, with a step-by-step playbook you can run in 45 minutes
👉 MIT Sloan Management Review: Formalize Escalation Procedures to Improve Decision-Making – an eight-year study of 1,400 executives on why structured escalation reduces peer-level conflict and improves decision quality
👉 GGV Capital: Scaling Startups with Stripe's Claire Hughes Johnson – practical advice on the "common node" approach, unblocking teams, and building systems that scale
Coming up tomorrow
Tomorrow, we're sharing a quick audit that catches the same inconsistencies in your deck, dashboard, and plan that investors find in diligence.
P.S. How long does a typical cross-team decision take at your company? Hit reply with your best guess.