Our weekly customer onboarding cycle involves marketing, sales, and operations, but because it spans three departments, nobody wants to take ownership of the weekly average onboarding days metric on our scorecard. How do we assign single-seat ownership to a metric that crosses multiple departmental lines?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When a critical metric spans multiple departments, assigning ownership can lead to finger-pointing. In the EOS framework, every number on your scorecard must have exactly one owner. You cannot have shared ownership. To resolve this, look at your Accountability Chart. The owner of the scorecard metric is not the person who does all the work. The owner is the person who is ultimately accountable for the result and has the authority to orchestrate the solution. For a metric like average customer onboarding days, which touches marketing, sales, and operations, the ownership belongs in the seat where the bottleneck most frequently occurs or where the final handoff is managed. Usually, this is the Operations seat. The Operations leader is responsible for reporting the number weekly. If the number goes red because Sales delayed sending the signed contract, the Operations leader does not get blamed. Instead, they own the responsibility to raise the issue during the Level 10 Meeting and lead the team to IDS the bottleneck. If your leadership team is still fighting over ownership, it is a sign that your Accountability Chart is unclear. Use the IDS process to clarify the roles and responsibilities for each seat. Once the roles are clear, assigning ownership of the scorecard metric becomes straightforward.