Roles, responsibilities, and accountability: the hidden ops problem that takes down tech companies
Early-stage tech companies are generally good at two things: moving fast, and keeping things informal. The informality is often deliberate. Some founders can act like process is overhead, that documented roles feel bureaucratic, that brilliant people can figure out who should be doing what. The culture is fluid, the org chart is a loose sketch if it even exists at all, and decisions tend to get made by whoever happens to be closest to them.
I want to be clear: I don’t think that’s wrong. Some of the best work I’ve seen came out of exactly that environment. Innovation is often born of chaos. The problem isn’t the chaos itself. It’s that most companies try to scale it rather than structure it — and when you do that, you don’t just grow the business. You grow the chaos along with everything else.
I have spent a significant chunk of my career as a COO and operations executive in exactly these environments. What I have observed, repeatedly, is that the failure mode is rarely a dramatic single event. It is the slow accumulation of unanswered questions: Who is actually responsible for this? Who signed off on that? When nobody can answer with confidence, or they only ever name one person, you have an accountability problem. And accountability problems, left unaddressed, become operational ones.
The gap nobody documents
In most early-stage companies, accountability structures exist only informally. There is a rough understanding of who does what, shaped by who founded what and who hired whom. This is often enough when the company is small, when everyone is in the same room, and when the stakes of getting it wrong are low.
As the company grows, that informal understanding doesn’t scale. New hires come in and operate based on assumptions about role boundaries that may not match what the founders intended. Founders’ roles evolve without anyone formally redefining them. A CEO who was once across everything starts making decisions unilaterally in areas that arguably belong to the board or to other executives because that’s always how it worked. Nobody pushes back because nobody wrote anything down.
Remote and hybrid environments make this significantly worse, and faster. In an office, there is a form of ambient accountability — you overhear a decision, you sense a shift in responsibility, you catch something before it becomes a problem. Distributed teams lose those natural cues entirely. If a decision isn’t documented, it effectively didn’t happen for half the organisation.
The tactical response is a shift from verbal-first to writing-first operations. In a distributed team, every major project or decision needs a single source of truth — a document that is not just a record of what was decided, but that explicitly tags who made the decision and who was consulted. Not buried in the body of the document. In the header, where it is visible from the moment anyone opens it. This is not bureaucracy for its own sake. It is the only reliable way to prevent new team members from operating on assumptions about role boundaries that nobody ever corrected, because nobody ever wrote them down.
I have sat in companies where a delegation of authority framework was listed as “none” and the desired state was “focused on high-level outcomes.” That gap, between no documented delegation and a vague aspiration, is where a lot of things go wrong. Without clear delegation, authority concentrates. Without documented accountability, nobody can be held to anything. And when a decision turns out to be a bad one, there is no paper trail to understand who made it or why.
When role confusion becomes a liability
The accountability problem is not just organisational. In a company with statutory obligations, it creates direct legal and financial exposure.
Consider the CEO’s employment agreement. Most founder-led tech companies have one. Most of those agreements include specific obligations: producing a business plan, meeting financial reporting requirements, acting as the point of contact for shareholders. These are not aspirational. They are contractual commitments, with the board as the counterparty.
In companies I have worked in and around, those obligations were frequently not met. Not because no one noticed, but because the accountability mechanism — the board actively enforcing the employment agreement — was not being used. Directors can require specific outputs as a condition of continued executive authority but most don’t. There’s a reasonably common pattern where a board will express dissatisfaction with management but stop short of the formal step of making accountability a condition of anything. The executive continues, the obligations continue to be unmet, and the gap between what was promised and what was delivered keeps widening.
For the company, the consequences are serious. No business plan means no ability to hold management accountable to a strategy. No financial reporting means no visibility for the board or investors. And when things deteriorate, the absence of these documents makes recovery far harder than it needed to be.
The informal norm problem
There is a specific dynamic I have seen in startup cultures that makes accountability particularly hard to establish. Informality becomes a value in itself. “We move fast here” is a culture statement that, when applied to governance and role definition, functions as a reason not to document anything.
What this creates in practice is a situation where formal structures exist on paper but informal norms override them. The shareholders agreement says the board must receive monthly management accounts. The informal norm is that the CEO provides what they think the board needs to know, when they think they need to know it. The formal structure says decisions of a certain kind require board approval. The informal norm is that the CEO makes those decisions and informs the board afterwards, if at all.
This is not malice, most of the time. It is the logical outcome of a culture that treats process as friction and accountability as bureaucracy. But the consequences are the same regardless of intent. Roles blur, oversight weakens, and the business becomes dependent on the judgment of whoever is at the centre of the web, with no structural way to challenge or correct that judgment when it goes wrong.
What actually fixes it
The solution is not a 40-page organisational design document. It is a few specific things, done with some care, at the right stages of the company’s growth.
The first is a documented delegation of authority. Not complex, not exhaustive. A simple framework that captures what the CEO can decide alone, what requires board approval, and what is explicitly delegated to other roles. This creates a reference point that everyone can use, and one that helps prevent the kind of slow drift of authority towards whoever happens to be the most assertive.
One of the most effective things I’ve implemented was a decision card. The context: a 15-person company with five C-suite executives (ridiculous, I know). Everyone got along, everyone was competent, and everyone was supportive of each other. But the moment a decision touched more than one function, things ground to a halt. The fix was literally the size of a birthday card. Each person had one: their name, their role, and most importantly, what decisions they were accountable for and who, if anyone, they needed to consult. In some cases it also carried veto powers — a CTO who could override any software selection, for instance. If someone was making a less than optimal decision that sat within your remit, you held up your card like a referee stopping play. Not as a challenge, as a clarification. The change was almost immediate. Clarity without bureaucracy. The card was the framework.
The second is enforcing what already exists. Most of the governance failures I have seen were not failures of documentation. The shareholders agreement was there. The employment agreement was there. The obligations were clear. What was missing was a board willing to require compliance. If a CEO’s role includes producing a business plan, and no business plan is produced, the board needs to make that a condition of continued authority. Not as a threat, as a function of accountability.
The third is separating roles from people. In founder-led companies, role definitions get tangled up with personal relationships. It becomes difficult to hold someone accountable because accountability feels personal. The way through this is to build accountability into the structure, not the relationship. Define what the role requires, make reporting against those requirements routine, and let the structure carry the weight rather than requiring a difficult conversation every time.
None of this eliminates the need for trust. But it gives trust something to stand on.
Selling it to a team that hates process
The hardest part of introducing any accountability structure into a founder-led company is not designing it. In a culture where informality is a value, introducing a Delegation of Authority framework can get you accused of slowing things down or not trusting the founders.
The reframe that works is speed. Not “we need this for accountability” but “this will make you faster.” When decision rights are unclear, everything that crosses a functional boundary becomes a meeting. It becomes a check-in, a loop-back, a conversation that needs to happen before anything can move. A clear delegation framework does not add process. It removes it. The meetings that exist only to establish who should be deciding something disappear, because that question already has an answer.
There is also a leadership argument worth making. Good leaders can do almost everything. Great leaders give capable people what they need and get out of the way. A documented delegation of authority is not about control — it is the mechanism by which a founder or CEO actually hands authority to their team. Without it, delegation is just a word. With it, it becomes real.
Frame it that way, and the chaos-loving founders will come around faster than you expect. Not because they suddenly love process, but because they love speed — and you have just shown them that structure is how you get it.
The pattern worth recognising
The companies that struggle with accountability tend to have a common shape. A charismatic or technically strong founder at the centre, a board that defers to them, an informal culture that treats documentation as overhead, and a set of obligations on paper that no one enforces. When the company is growing and cash is coming in, this is manageable. When it hits turbulence, the accountability deficit becomes the crisis.
I have seen this pattern in its early stages, where it is still fixable, and I have seen it after it became unfixable. The difference between the two is usually not timing. It is whether anyone in the room was willing to name what was happening and insist that something be done about it.
That is, in practice, what accountability requires.
Key takeaways – for COOs and ops leads
If you’re the only person who knows how decisions actually get made in your company, that’s not influence. It’s a single point of failure.
Documenting delegation of authority is not an admission that things are broken. It is the thing that keeps them from breaking. Build the framework before you need it.
Your job is to make the organisation less dependent on any one person’s judgment, including your own.
Key takeaways – for founders, CEOs, and boards
If there is no documented delegation of authority in your company, there is no accountability framework. Whoever is most assertive will fill the gap.
Informal norms override formal structures over time. If your culture treats process as overhead, your governance will reflect that eventually.
A board that expresses dissatisfaction but stops short of enforcing consequences is not exercising governance. It is observing it. The authority to require specific outputs as a condition of continued executive delegation is one of the most underused tools available.
The accountability gap rarely announces itself. It shows up in the absence of documents, the vagueness of answers, and the inability to reconstruct how decisions were made.
Frequently asked questions
What is a delegation of authority framework and does a small company need one? A delegation of authority framework is a documented set of rules that defines who can make which decisions, and when they need to consult or escalate. Small companies often assume they’re too early for this — but the accountability gaps that form without one compound quickly, and are significantly harder to fix once the company scales.
How do you maintain accountability in a remote or hybrid team? The core shift is from verbal-first to writing-first operations. Every significant decision needs a single source of truth that explicitly records who made the call and who was consulted — not buried in meeting notes, but visible at the top of the document where anyone joining the project can find it immediately.
How do you introduce process into a startup culture that resists it? Frame it as a speed tool, not a governance one. When decision rights are unclear, every cross-functional decision becomes a meeting. A clear delegation framework eliminates those meetings because the question of who decides already has an answer — and when decisions move faster, the whole company stays nimble.
I'm John Chung, I've spent over 15 years building and running startups and scale-ups as a founder, operator, and non-executive director (GAICD). I write about the gap between how companies are supposed to operate and how they actually operate.
All content is produced by me, reflecting my own experience and judgement. Generative AI tools were used for editorial support, in this case Claude specifically.