When people don’t know who owns something, one of two things happens: it gets done twice, or it doesn’t get done at all. Most “communication problems” in growing companies are really ownership problems — two people who each think the other is handling the customer escalation, or a metric nobody feels responsible for.
Defining roles and responsibilities fixes this. Not with a 40-page job architecture, but with a short written answer to one question for every seat in the business: what does this role own?
Start with seats, not people
Design the roles the business needs first; put names in them second. If you start with the people you have, you’ll write roles around their current habits and strengths — and you’ll find gaps nobody covers and overlaps two people fight over.
A useful exercise for a leadership team:
- List the major functions — sales, marketing, operations, finance, people, product.
- For each, list the four or five outcomes it’s responsible for.
- Group outcomes into seats a single person could reasonably own.
- Only then, put a name in each seat. One person may hold two seats in a small company; that’s fine, as long as it’s explicit.
For the leadership-level version of this exercise, see design your org structure.
What to write for each role
Keep each role description to a page. It should cover:
- Purpose — one sentence on why the seat exists. “Turn signed customers into successful, renewing ones.”
- Responsibilities — three to six outcomes the seat owns. Outcomes, not tasks: “customers live within 30 days of signing”, not “send welcome emails”.
- Metrics — the one to three numbers that show whether the seat is doing its job.
- Decisions — what this person can decide alone, and what needs someone else.
- Reports to — the seat above it.
The metrics line is the most important and the most often skipped. A responsibility without a measure tends to drift into “I’m working on it”.
| Seat | Example responsibilities | Example metrics (cadence) |
|---|---|---|
| Customer success lead | Onboarding, renewals, account health | Days to go-live (weekly, inverted), renewal rate (monthly) |
| Operations manager | Delivery on time and to standard | On-time delivery (weekly), rework rate (weekly, inverted) |
| Finance lead | Cash, reporting, collections | Cash balance (weekly), receivables over 60 days (weekly, inverted) |
| People lead | Hiring, onboarding, retention | Open roles past target date (weekly, inverted), 90-day new-hire retention (monthly) |
Putting it into practice in Clarion
Write role descriptions in the knowledgebase. Create a category called “Roles” in Settings → Categories, then add one knowledgebase article per seat with New Article. Publish them Company-wide, so anyone can check who owns what before they ask. When a role changes, edit the article; once it’s published, every edit keeps a version, so you can see how the role has evolved. See write knowledgebase articles and manage categories and tags.
Mirror your structure in teams. Clarion’s teams can be nested: every company starts with a Leadership team, and you can create teams under it — Sales, Operations, Finance — and teams under those. Each team gets its own metrics, milestones, challenges and syncs, and a parent team sees a roll-up of the teams that report to it. Admins create teams in Settings → Teams. See create teams.
Team membership also controls visibility: owners and admins see every team, and everyone else sees the teams they’ve been added to.
Make ownership explicit everywhere. This is where role definitions stop being documents and start being daily practice:
- Every metric has an owner. Make sure the metrics named in each role description are owned by the person in that seat. See metrics.
- Every milestone has one assignee. Quarterly projects should land in the seat whose outcomes they serve. See milestones.
- Every action item and challenge can have an owner, so work coming out of meetings has a name on it.
A quick audit: open the Metrics page and look for metrics with no owner, or one person owning far more than anyone else. Both are signs a role isn’t clear.
Don’t confuse access roles with job roles
When you invite someone to Clarion, you choose an access role — Owner, Admin, Full Access, Advisor or Contractor. These control what someone can administer in the app: owners and admins manage settings, teams, members and integrations, and see every team. They’re not job descriptions, and they don’t say what a person is responsible for. See roles and permissions.
Job roles — what someone owns in the business — live in your role descriptions and in what they own on the scorecard.
Keep it current
- Review roles when the structure changes. A new hire, a promotion or a new team is a prompt to re-read the affected role descriptions.
- Review once a year regardless. Roles drift. An annual pass, done alongside annual planning, catches it.
- Use the weekly sync as a signal. If a challenge keeps coming back because “nobody owns this”, that’s a role-definition problem. Fix the role, not just the challenge.
Common mistakes
- Shared ownership. “Sales and marketing jointly own pipeline” means neither does. Pick one owner; others contribute.
- Task lists instead of outcomes. A list of tasks goes out of date the week it’s written. Outcomes last.
- No metrics. If you can’t say how you’d know the seat is working, the role isn’t defined yet.
- Writing roles around people. It feels kind; it creates gaps.
- Keeping it private. Role descriptions only help if the rest of the team can find them.
Next, use the role description on day one: see onboard a new team member.