soft-skills
When and how should I delegate work? 2026-01-10 
As a small company we unfortunately do not have the spare resources to allow certain people to only care about small bits of the work to be done. You should rarely be in a situation where you hand over full responsibility for an issue to someone else. Cases where this can happen is when you go on sick leave or when a vacation is coming up in combination with a planning failure.
What does happen often is that part of an issue requires someone else to do some work. If this happens it is important to have a clear idea of the answers to the following questions: - Which specific person (you cannot delegate to a group) should do it? - What needs to happen? (List the steps that should be executed) - What is all the information they need to execute the task? - By when does the outcome need to have been reached? - What communication do you expect from the person executing the task? - What is the reason the work should not be done by you?
When asking someone to do work for you, make sure to answer these questions in your message. If you are unclear about any of these you need to ask more informational questions before delegating.
When you ask someone to do part of your issue you stay responsible for the outcome. This means it is up to you to remind the other person if they fail to do the task before the deadline. It is also up to you to check if the outcome is actually what you wanted.
You should always be the expert on this specific issue. If people have questions about the issue they should be able to ask those to you, you cannot redirect them to the person you delegated to. If you are missing the information to answer the questions you should ask those questions to the person you delegated to and forward the information to the person that asked the original question.
Not knowing how to do something is not a good reason the work should not be done by you. We are a consultancy group making software for startups. This means that everyones job is to become good at doing things we have not done before. If you do not know how to do something the fastest way to find out is by asking. If you don't have enough context yet to formulate something to ask, it's helpful to look at What should I ask if I don't know what to ask.
Example
@Max, would you mind rebooting the Zulip server tomorrow between 12:00 and 14:00? You will be the first responder then so it would be faster if you do it. Would you mind pinging me when the server has been rebooted?