Early on, we hired an operations manager. The idea was simple. We wanted to have a generalist close to the founders who keeps the internal machine running. Then the company grew, and the job grew with it, quietly. By the time we looked up, the same person was leading a small team, managing an entire business function, and serving as the default owner for everything without an owner. The title still said operations manager. The job description in our files covered maybe a third of the actual work.

We treated job descriptions as hiring artifacts. You write one, fill the role, file it away. In most cases we even did not have an internal description but more loose expectations and the job advertisement at our career page. I no longer think that is enough. The job description worth the most is the one you write again once the scope has visibly changed.

Roles drifted without anyone deciding it

In most cases scope increased with longterm hires because they proved capable to take over a new problem. A finance topic had no owner and landed there. A small team formed around part of the work and needed a lead. Then certification projects like a SOC 2, decision memos for the leadership team, and the odd legal questions. Each addition was reasonable on its own. Nobody, including me, went back and asked what the sum of all this had become. Its important to mention that this didnt happen only for this operations specific role. It happened in other areas as well like product, sales, customer success and so on as the company grew. We have a loose framework for levels and their scope but also that we mostly only updated once a year if at all.

Researchers call the bottom-up version of this phenomenon job crafting. People reshape the boundaries of their own work, and strong generalists reshape them more than anyone since they are capable of taking over a bunch of new topics as they come up. Leading people adds a layer of its own; I wrote earlier about how the job changes around the third report. I do not think the drift was the problem. The problem was that our written picture of the role remained static for three years, while the real role kept evolving and the mental picture adapted quickly to the incremental changes.

For a long time nothing forced us to notice. Everything worked, the person was one of our strongest, and there was no incident to react to. That is what makes role drift tricky.

The title debate that went in circles

The incident we had was a title debate. The person felt the title no longer reflected the job’s weight. Therefore the operations person wanted to have another title which would better describe the scope changes which happened silently in the last years. Our philosophy is to not give titles away and participate in the titles inflation. We had quite a few incidents that teammembers tried to expand or shift scope which they tried to justify with a title and how the specific title is seen and lived in another company.

Under the title sat the real questions, anyway: money, fairness compared to peers inside and outside the company, and whether this person still saw a future with us given the package and prestige of the job.

Writing the job down like a written narrative helped

The conversation changed when it moved from talk to paper. One short document did the work.

A job description containing which contained a role description, and the role profile. A role definition first: what the organization intends this title to cover, decision rights included. Then a role profile: the job this person actually does today, written as if we had to hire for it tomorrow.

This helped us as founders to gain clarity what kind of role or position was needed at the moment. It also forced us like with a written narrative to really think through the different scenarios which we have to cover now and in the future. On paper, the exercise works the way Amazon’s narrative memos work: writing forces a specificity that our conversations never reached.

What is a second job description?

A second job description is the role document you write for someone who already holds the job: the responsibilities as they exist today, the decision rights that come with them, and what the role is worth. The first job description gets someone in the door. The second one checks whether you still fit together.

The trigger should not be tenure, nor should it be frustration. It is scope. When the real responsibilities no longer match the written ones, the role is due for a rewrite, whether that happens after eight months or after four years. In our case, the gap had built up over three years before we closed it. That is not a schedule I would recommend. In hindsight, we were simply lucky that the person stayed patient long enough for us to catch up.

The format matters less than the discipline. One or two pages, in prose where reasoning is needed. The responsibilities as they exist now. Decision rights, stated plainly enough that someone could act on them tomorrow. What the company needs from the role next, not only what it currently absorbs. And a number, because a role description without a value attached postpones the hardest part of the conversation to another day.

Two things the second job description is not: a performance review, and a retention trick. If you only write it when someone threatens to leave, you are too late.

Two things worth trying this week

Take your longest-tenured generalist and write one page describing the job they actually do today. Put it next to the posting you hired them with. The distance between the two documents tells you how much unmanaged drift you are carrying, and it tends to surprise both sides.

And when a title discussion loops for the second time, stop debating the label. Write the role down instead: responsibilities, decision rights, what it is worth. One written page moved us more than months of well-meaning conversation.

I will not pretend our story is closed. The package outlined in the documents is still being worked out, and it may yet fall through. But the conversation has had a different shape since the job existed on paper. Roles in a young company change faster than titles do. The second job description is how we plan to catch up on purpose next time, instead of three years late.