Jason Murrell has founded, scaled and advised companies across consumer brands, cyber security, AI and listed tech. When he talks to founders about where things go wrong, he comes back to three functions: growth, product and operations. Every business needs all three working well. Many founders try to run all three themselves. He has watched the pattern from every seat: founder, adviser, chair.
The usual fix is to hire. Jason's view, in a recent post to founders, is that hiring doesn't solve it on its own. 'These are 3 functions, not necessarily three people,' he wrote. What matters more than headcount is that each function has someone accountable for the result.
That's the distinction worth sitting with. Handing over a task is not handing over accountability.
Where growth falls through
Growth is the easiest of the three to split into tasks with no owner. Someone writes the content, someone runs the events, someone books the ads, and nobody answers for the number that matters: meetings with the people on the target map. A founder can delegate the newsletter, the trade show and the LinkedIn posts and still be the only person who knows whether any of it produced a meeting.
Giving growth an owner means giving it a number. Meetings, opportunities and pipeline, reported monthly against named accounts. The report is one page. Meetings this month, with names. Opportunities opened, with dates. Pipeline touched, with dollars. What was tested, what moved, and what gets tested next week. Once that page has a person's name at the top, the tasks start sorting themselves into the ones that move it and the ones that don't.
The owner doesn't have to be a full-time hire. It can be a founder with two hours a week and a clear target, or an outside team held to the same number. The test is whether one person can answer 'what did marketing produce this month?' with a figure rather than a feeling.
The quieter two
Product and operations fail differently. Product without an owner drifts into a feature list shaped by whoever asked most recently, until the roadmap reads as an apology. Operations without an owner stays invisible right up to the day a customer feels it. Each deserves its own piece; growth gets the longer treatment here because growth is where ownership most often dissolves into activity, and because it is the function founders most readily mistake for a set of tasks.
Three questions for this week
Jason suggests founders start with three questions. Which function needs strengthening? Who owns the outcome? How will success be measured?
Ask them about growth first. If the answer to the second question is 'everyone', the honest answer is nobody.
He closed his post with a question of his own, and it's the one that stays with us: which of the three have you found hardest to hand over?
