Two of my strongest leadership team members are constantly arguing over who owns our customer success metrics because the responsibility seems to sit between sales and operations. How do we resolve this seat overlap?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Overlapping accountabilities create friction, finger-pointing, and missed metrics. The core principle of the Accountability Chart is that there can only be one name in each seat, and every major metric on your Scorecard must have one owner. When two people are responsible, nobody is responsible. To resolve this conflict, you must pull both leaders into a room and look at the structure objectively, completely separating the seats from the people currently sitting in them. Define the customer success function. Is it primarily about driving account retention and upsells, which sits closer to sales? Or is it about service delivery and onboarding, which sits closer to operations? Once you clarify the primary purpose of the function, assign the ultimate accountability to a single seat on your Accountability Chart. The owner of that seat will be the sole name on the Scorecard for customer success metrics. The other leader may still play a supporting role in the process, but they must respect the seat owner's authority. If the work is truly massive and distinct from both sales and operations, you may need to create a new, separate customer success seat on the leadership team. Whichever path you choose, make a clean, objective decision, update your V/TO, and hold the single designated leader accountable for the numbers.