The Symptoms
Role clarity problems feel like people problems. They look like friction between two specific individuals. But the root cause is almost always structural: the organization hasn't defined who is accountable for what clearly enough.
- Duplicated work. Two people or two teams do the same work because neither knows the other is doing it. Customer research happens in Product and in Marketing. Data pipelines are built in Engineering and in the Analytics team.
- Dropped work. Important outcomes fall between roles because each person assumes the other is handling it. Nobody owns the customer handoff between Sales and CS, so customers experience a gap after signing.
- "Whose job is this?" This question gets asked regularly in meetings, Slack threads, or escalation conversations. It's the clearest signal of a role boundary problem.
- Manager mediates turf conflicts. The manager spends time resolving disputes about who should be doing what instead of setting direction. The same disputes recur because the structural ambiguity hasn't been resolved.
- New hires can't figure out their scope. A new hire is told they own "product marketing" but discovers that the PM does messaging, the sales team writes case studies, and the content team manages the blog. Their actual scope is whatever's left.
Why It's A Structural Problem
Rewriting job descriptions doesn't fix role clarity. Job descriptions describe what a role should do in theory. Role clarity is about what happens in practice: who is accountable for each critical outcome, and do they actually have the authority and resources to deliver it?
Role clarity breaks for structural reasons:
- The role was created without retiring the old accountability. A new "Head of Customer Experience" is hired, but nobody tells CS, Product, and Operations that they no longer own the parts of customer experience that this role now covers. The new role has a title but not real ownership.
- The org grew but role boundaries didn't update. At 30 people, the PM did product marketing, wrote docs, and managed launches. At 80 people, there's now a product marketer, a technical writer, and a launch manager, but nobody explicitly divided the PM's old responsibilities among the new roles.
- Dotted-line relationships are used to avoid real decisions. "Sarah is dotted-line to both teams" means Sarah doesn't have a clear home. When priorities conflict between the two teams, Sarah is stuck.
The Role Clarity Audit
This diagnostic takes 1-2 hours for a team or function. It surfaces the specific boundaries that need clarification.
Step 1: List the critical outcomes
For the team or function you're auditing, list 10-15 outcomes that matter most. These are not tasks; they're results. "Customer NPS" is an outcome. "Run weekly survey" is a task. Focus on outcomes.
Step 2: For each outcome, name the accountable role
Not the person, the role. If you can name exactly one role that is accountable for each outcome, clarity is good. If you can't, you've found a gap or overlap.
Three patterns to watch for:
- Gap: no role is clearly accountable. The outcome is everyone's responsibility and nobody's job.
- Overlap: two roles are both accountable. Both believe they own it, and they either duplicate work or fight over it.
- Mismatch: the accountable role doesn't have authority over the inputs. The CS team is accountable for renewal rate but has no influence over the product decisions that drive churn.
Step 3: Run the handoff audit
Identify the 5-6 most important cross-role handoffs, the places where work passes from one role to another. For each handoff, answer:
- Who initiates the handoff?
- Who receives it?
- What does "done" look like for the sender? What does "ready" look like for the receiver?
- What happens when the handoff fails? Who is responsible for fixing it?
If any of these questions can't be answered clearly, the handoff is a structural gap. It will fail regularly until the boundary is clarified.
Worked Example: Sales-to-CS Handoff
The symptom: customers routinely report a rough onboarding experience. They say "I had to re-explain everything to my CSM that I already told the sales rep." Time-to-value is 2x the target.
The structural problem: no one owns the handoff between Sales and CS. The AE closes the deal and moves to the next prospect. The CSM picks up the customer but doesn't have deal context, implementation requirements, or the promises made during the sales cycle. The CRM has partial notes.
The fix options:
- Option A: Assign the handoff to Sales. The AE is accountable for a structured handoff: a completed handoff document, a joint call with the CSM and the customer, and a clean CRM record. The AE's commission is partially gated on handoff quality. This works when the AE has capacity and the incentive is real.
- Option B: Create a handoff role. An Onboarding Coordinator sits between Sales and CS. They attend late-stage sales calls, capture requirements, and run the first 30 days of the customer relationship before handing off to a long-term CSM. This works when deal volume is high enough to justify a dedicated role.
- Option C: Extend the AE's ownership. The AE stays involved for the first 30 days post-sale. They don't do the CS work, but they're on the hook for customer satisfaction through go-live. This works when deal cycles are long and AEs have relationship capital that shouldn't be discarded at contract signature.
The "right" answer depends on the company's deal volume, AE capacity, and customer complexity. But the structural point is the same: someone has to own the handoff explicitly. "Sales and CS will coordinate" is not an answer.
When To Create, Clarify, Or Merge A Role
| Situation | Action | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|
| A critical outcome has no accountable role | Create a role or assign the outcome to an existing role with the authority and capacity to own it. | Creating a role without retiring the old informal ownership. The new role and the old owner will overlap. |
| Two roles overlap on the same outcome | Clarify: decide which role is accountable and which provides input. Remove the overlap explicitly. | Splitting the baby: "you own the strategy and they own the execution" sounds clean but often creates a new coordination problem. |
| A role is too broad to be effective | Split the role into two roles with distinct outcomes. Or narrow the scope and let go of the parts that are diluting effectiveness. | Splitting into two roles that still need to coordinate on everything. The split should create independence, not a new handoff. |
| A role is too narrow to justify a full position | Merge it into an adjacent role. Or expand the scope to cover related outcomes. | Merging roles with different skill requirements. "PM + project manager" sounds efficient but rarely works because the skill sets are different. |
Sources And Further Reading
- Jay R. Galbraith, Designing Organizations.
- Patrick Lencioni, The Advantage.
- Henry Mintzberg, Structure in Fives.
- Richard Hackman, Leading Teams.
Continue Reading
Once roles are clear, the next diagnostic is whether the management layers above them are structured well.
Next guideLayers And Organizational Depth
How to count layers, when to compress them, and the tradeoff between decision speed and management capacity.