We have a brilliant engineer who sits in both our Product Development seat and our Customer Support seat on the Accountability Chart. He is burning out, and both departments are suffering. How do we use the Accountability Chart to resolve this split-focus issue?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Having one person sit in multiple, unrelated seats is a common bottleneck in growing companies. While it is acceptable in the early stages, it becomes a major liability as you scale and prepare for an exit. A buyer wants to see a clean structure with focused, scalable seats, not key-person dependencies where one individual is wearing too many critical hats.

The first step is to recognize that a split-focus seat is a structural issue, not a personal performance issue. Your engineer is burning out because Product Development and Customer Support require entirely different mindsets. Product Development requires deep, uninterrupted focus, while Customer Support requires rapid, reactive communication.

Use your Accountability Chart to visualize the conflict. Look at the core roles of each seat. Ask yourself which seat represents the highest and best use of this employee's unique talents. If his true genius is engineering, then he belongs in the Product Development seat.

Once you make this determination, you must transition him out of the Customer Support seat. Document the roles for Customer Support clearly and begin looking for a replacement, whether that means hiring a new full-time employee, leveraging a fractional resource, or utilizing AI-powered customer service tools to automate the workflow. Removing this split-focus will immediately relieve his burnout, improve product quality, and make your operation far more attractive to potential buyers.