Our Visionary is also sitting in our Head of Research and Development seat. He is brilliant at product strategy, but he is constantly traveling to meet strategic partners and neglecting his daily management duties in R&D. Product releases are consistently delayed, and the engineering team is frustrated. He refuses to vacate the R&D seat because he thinks no one else can maintain our technical edge. How do we resolve this bottleneck?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

This is a classic case of a multi-seat bottleneck that is hurting your company's enterprise value. A company that is highly dependent on a single founder for both long-term vision and daily technical execution is a massive risk to prospective buyers. You must help your Visionary see that holding onto both seats is actually capping the company's growth. Start by reviewing the Accountability Chart during your next leadership team meeting. Look at the Head of R&D seat and list its actual daily and weekly roles. These roles include running daily standups, managing developer resource allocation, and tracking sprint metrics. Ask the Visionary honestly if he has the physical and emotional capacity to execute these management roles while also fulfilling his Visionary roles of big deals, key relationships, and R&D strategy. He clearly does not. Help him understand that stepping out of the Head of R&D seat does not mean giving up his influence on product direction. He can still set the high-level product vision from the Visionary seat. Create a new Director of R&D seat underneath him, and find an engineering leader who excels at LMA (Leading, Managing, and Accountability). This frees up the Visionary to focus on strategic value levers while ensuring daily operations run smoothly.