Welcome to The Memo by Vecto.
We’ve all seen unowned tasks slow down our growing teams. In this edition, learn how companies like Stripe and GitHub navigated the turn from growth hustle to clear role design, and get a practical four-part framework to map accountabilities for your own team.
Let’s dig in.
Raise your hand if this has happened to you during a recent product launch or sprint.
Your growing team is working out of a shared space, there’s a small table covered in takeout containers, and you’re all low on sleep. Energy and ownership are at an all-time high.
With a few weeks remaining until launch, you open your Asana board to just ‘see what’s going on’.
A quick review shows most tasks are moving forward, some with minor delays. Looking closer, you begin to notice some tasks without assigned owners or updates.
Everyone picked the fun-and-visible tasks first: designing graphics, selecting event catering, and drafting ad copy. Meanwhile, the grown-up back-end work sits unassigned. Vendor contracts remain pending, payment gateway integration lacks updates, and regional tax filings sit untouched – all three have been ‘kept for later’ clearly.
The creative jobs had an abundance of doers, while the cumbersome yet critical work sat ignored.
The sad part is that every startup operator’s hands are going to go up on this one.
The good part is that knowing all of us have been there means we can do something about it.
An Operations To-Do List is Never Fully Done ✅
Building a company requires thoughtful org design long before rapid growth tests your limits. As your team expands, clarity in responsibility provides team members with the psychological safety they need to perform effectively.
This pattern has shown up repeatedly in growing startups. In the early days, Operations runs seamlessly on goodwill and personal dedication. Early employees become generalists and take genuine pride in doing whatever it takes to support the vision. They answer customer queries in the morning, sort out logistics in the afternoon, then fix website bugs at night.
Without roles and boundaries, people lean toward visible, high-energy projects.
Brainstorming campaign strategies is always exciting. Auditing bank statements or reviewing vendor contracts feels not-so-urgent.
As operations expand, these broad roles become fragile Jenga blocks. When one person does twelve random cross-functional duties, taking any time off creates immediate chaos.
Whether it’s unread emails or vendor disputes, all unassigned responsibilities fall on the founder and core team members who are the default problem solvers.
They’ll cover these gaps in the present, but over time they’ll notice that execution has slowed, their energy is drained, and many frustrations have compounded.
Drawing the Box First
Building a resilient startup means drawing structural boxes regardless of how ‘corporate’ that process may feel. You learn to design roles before placing anyone inside them instead of the other way around. You define the exact outcome the company needs, regardless of who holds the ‘role’ today.
When team members shift focus or transition, the underlying boxes remain steady. Finally, Operations can carry on smoothly while the business maintains its rhythm and balance.
Real-World Startup Lessons
In my experience working alongside core engineering and operations teams across India and Singapore, scaling hurdles rarely stem from a lack of talent. They almost always come from a lack of structure that can be course corrected just like these globally loved startups have done in recent times:
GitHub’s Transition Beyond Manager-less Flatness
In its early stages, GitHub operated under an entirely flat organizational structure without formal managers or traditional job titles up to about 200 employees. As the company scaled beyond its founding team, operating without designated management constantly led to operational friction.
Decisions and authority drifted toward informal power dynamics and vocal individuals, as they do, instead of the most capable experts. Over time, essential tasks began to lack owners, coordination costs escalated, and team members spent more time guessing power structures than on getting work done.
In 2014, leadership introduced explicit management structures, standardized role definitions, and transparent reporting lines. Establishing documented accountabilities restored operational clarity, removed informal decision bottlenecks, and stabilized employee morale as the team continued scaling.
Zappos’ Experiments with Holacracy
Holacracy is a self-organizing model where authority is distributed to roles within fluid circles rather than individual managers.
When Zappos attempted to eliminate traditional management structures in favor of Holacracy, leadership anticipated faster execution. The goal was to eliminate bureaucracy and grant employees complete autonomy over their daily work. However, without explicit outcome boundaries for individual roles, employees spent up to 5 hours each week navigating governance meetings.
The persistent ambiguity created severe operational fatigue, leading 18 percent of the workforce (~260 employees) to accept severance packages and leave the company in 2015.
Stripe’s Focus on Role Design
During Stripe's growth from 200 to over 7,000 employees, early operators continued managing broad, overlapping sets of duties across multiple business lines.
As transaction volumes and global complexities multiplied, having single individuals hold dozens of varied cross-functional duties created severe operational bottlenecks. Unassigned tasks drifted back to leadership, decision speed slowed down across new markets, and core team members faced burnout from handling endless edge cases.
Former COO Claire Hughes Johnson designed single-threaded, outcome-focused "boxes" before placing people in any of them. Stripe established written operating principles, explicit decision rights, and dedicated metric owners across the company.
This structural clarity removed founder dependency, protected operator well-being, and sustained rapid global execution, making Stripe the company it is today.
Getting Started with Org and Role Design
If you’re seeing these cracks in your startup’s operations, here’s a practical four-part role-design template you can implement for your team immediately:
Hot Tips for Managing Implementation Friction IRL
Templates always look simple on paper, but any structural changes require thoughtfulness around team dynamics and individual ownership before taking it live.
Identity Shifts: Early team members often associate their value with how many tasks they manage and how much everyone relies on them. Reassure team members that narrowing their focus increases their impact and operational intelligence.
Hidden Tasks: Every growing company relies on unwritten tasks, such as tracking regional tax updates or clearing customs holds. Identify these hidden tasks during a weekly review and assign them to specific roles.
Granting Authority: Defining a role requires real delegation. Ensure financial and operational sign-off officially transfers to the role owner, not just the workload.
Timing Your Org Design So You’re Not Overdoing It
Timing is critical when introducing any structure.
Drafting detailed org charts when ten people share a desk is unnecessary complexity. Writing formal JDs before finding PMF can complicate and isolate your core team.
Eventually, you will notice two operators working on the same task independently without realizing someone else is on it, or see dispatches delayed because everyone assumed the last person who did it had it covered.
That’s the ideal time to build formal roles and design your org.
Defining clear role boundaries is ultimately a practical act of care for your team. When people understand precisely where their ownership begins and ends, they can focus their full energy on delivering exceptional work without the weight of unassigned ambiguity.
Before I sign off.
Where are you noticing unassigned responsibilities creeping into your team's daily flow?
And how often have you seen things break in the past month?
Reply and let me know.
Until next time,
Shweta.