Success Is Everybody’s Job and Nobody’s Responsibility

June 2025 – Jonathan Greaves ©

Customer success is a team sport. At least that’s what most modern SaaS companies say. It sounds collaborative. Healthy. Progressive.

But in practice, it often creates a dangerous operational problem. When success is everybody’s job it quietly becomes nobody’s responsibility.

Sales closes the deal.
Support closes the ticket.
Product ships the feature.
Marketing drives the campaign.
Customer Success manages the relationship.

And everyone assumes someone else is carrying the bigger picture.

Meanwhile the customer experiences the company as ONE relationship.

Not five departments.

This is one of the biggest structural problems in modern business:
we measure activity inside silos while relationships exist across them.

That’s why organisations can have:

• green dashboards,
• healthy KPIs,
• strong usage metrics,
• and “successful” teams…

…while relationships quietly deteriorate underneath.

Over the last decade working in B2B SaaS, I kept seeing the same pattern:

The role carrying the responsibility often controlled the smallest portion of the actual relationship.

Especially in Customer Success.

The result? Invisible ownership, leading to misalignment. Chasing this ownership when either invisible or unattainable, can lead worse to burnout and poor experience with relationships that depend too heavily on a few overstretched contributors.

This is one of the ideas behind the Relationship Intelligence™ thinking I’ve been developing through Agrea.

Instead of asking:
“Who owns the customer?”

We should be asking:
“How is contribution distributed across the relationship?”

Because modern business relationships are no longer transactional.
They’re ecosystems. And ecosystems fail when contribution is invisible.

That’s where I believe the next evolution of operational thinking begins.

Not with more dashboards.
Not with more tooling.
But with better relationship intelligence.

Do you Agrea?