We are scaling our SaaS business for an exit and our current Accountability Chart has our customer support team reporting to our VP of Engineering. This is causing engineering to get bogged down in customer tickets. How do we restructure these seats to clean up our reporting lines for potential buyers?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Having customer support report to engineering is a common early-stage structure, but it is a major bottleneck as you scale toward an exit. Buyers want to see a clear separation between product development and customer success. When your engineering team is constantly interrupted by daily support tickets, your product roadmap slips, and your customer service quality suffers.

To fix this, you must decouple these functions on your Accountability Chart. Create a dedicated Customer Success seat that reports directly to the Integrator, completely separate from the Engineering seat. The Engineering seat must focus solely on product development, system architecture, and quality assurance testing. The new Customer Success seat should own onboarding, customer retention, ticket resolution, and upselling.

If you cannot afford to hire a full-time VP of Customer Success right now, you can temporarily have an existing leader, such as your VP of Sales, sit in that seat on the chart. However, you must keep the seats and roles visually distinct to show buyers that the structure is built for scale.

Clearly define the five major roles for both the Engineering and Customer Success seats. This change will immediately free up your engineers to focus on high-value development and automation, while giving your customers a dedicated team focused on retention. A clean separation here proves to potential acquirers that you have a scalable support engine that does not drain your technical resources.