The Decision Rights Nobody Wrote Down
There’s a category of complaint that comes up in almost every conversation I have with a SaaS or tech founder about a marketing hire that didn’t work.
They weren’t proactive enough.
They kept bringing me things they should have been able to decide themselves.
They never really took ownership.
Every one of those is describing the same underlying condition, and every one of them gets recorded as a fact about the person.
None of them are.
They’re descriptions of somebody operating without defined decision rights, and decision rights are the single most consequential thing missing from most first marketing hires, and the thing least likely to appear in the post-mortem afterwards.
Responsibility is not authority
Look at the job description you wrote for that role.
It will tell you, in some detail, what the person was responsible for.
Content.
Campaigns.
Pipeline contribution.
Brand.
Reporting.
It may run to twenty bullet points.
Now find the part that says what they could decide.
It almost certainly isn’t there. Job specs describe activity and outcomes. They very rarely describe authority, and the two are not the same thing at all.
A person can be accountable for pipeline and not permitted to choose a channel. Accountable for brand and unable to sign off a piece of copy. Accountable for growth with no discretionary spend whatsoever.
That isn’t a marketing hire. That’s a very expensive pair of hands with a target attached.
The gap between what someone is accountable for and what they’re allowed to decide is where most first hires quietly fail. And it fails in a way that looks, from the outside, exactly like a performance problem.
Silence isn’t permission
This is the part that surprises founders most, and it’s worth sitting with.
Most founders believe they’ve granted autonomy because they haven’t withheld it. Nobody said no. Nobody set restrictions. The person was told to come in and run marketing, and the absence of constraint was intended as freedom.
An experienced person joining a new business reads it in precisely the opposite direction.
They’re doing a risk calculation, whether or not they’d describe it that way. Overstepping in month two, spending money you didn’t expect, changing something you were attached to, making a call that turns out to have been yours, is expensive and hard to recover from. Asking first is cheap. It costs a bit of credibility and five minutes of your time.
So in the absence of anything explicit, a sensible person will consistently assume they have less authority than you meant to give them.
Undefined decision rights don’t default to freedom. They default to waiting.
Then, three months later, waiting gets described as a lack of initiative.
The retroactive veto
There’s a specific version of this that does more damage than the rest combined, and it’s worth naming because it’s so easy to do without realising.
A piece of work gets under way. It’s visible, mentioned in meetings, shared in updates, maybe presented once. Nobody raises a concern. It proceeds for weeks on that basis.
Then it gets stopped. Not adjusted, not redirected. Stopped, on the grounds that it was fundamentally not what the business needed.
Consider what the person on the other end of that has just learned.
Not “I misjudged this.” Something far more corrosive: that visible progress and an absence of objection do not constitute approval. That there is no state of affairs in which they can be confident a decision is safe.
Once someone has learned that, they stop proposing things. Not out of sulkiness, out of accurate risk assessment. The only genuinely safe action left is to do what they’ve been explicitly told to do, and nothing else.
Which is then read as passivity, disengagement, or someone who’s mentally checked out.
I’ll be direct about this one: I’ve been on the receiving end of it, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to understand it as a structural failure rather than a personal one. That’s rather the point. The person it happens to almost always concludes it was about them.
Why founders find this specific thing hard
None of this happens because founders are controlling. Some are, but that’s not what’s driving it.
It happens because when you’ve been doing marketing yourself, every decision has been yours by default. There has never been any reason to articulate which ones matter, which are reversible, which need your input and which genuinely don’t. The question has never had to exist.
Your first marketing hire is the first moment it exists, and it arrives when you’re stretched, relieved that someone else is picking this up, and least inclined to sit down and specify something that feels like bureaucracy.
So it doesn’t get specified. And then it decides everything.
What actually goes on the page
The fix is far smaller than the problem. It’s one page, three columns, and about fifteen line items.
Decides alone. Genuinely alone, makes the call, gets on with it, tells you afterwards if it’s interesting. Typical entries: which channels to test, spend up to an agreed threshold, day-to-day copy and content, choosing and briefing freelancers within budget, tooling under a certain cost, publishing schedule.
Decides with you. Brings a recommendation, expects a conversation, but the recommendation carries weight. Typical entries: quarterly priorities, budget allocation across channels, anything that changes how the product is described, campaign concepts of any real size, what counts as a qualified lead, which by definition also needs sales in the room.
Comes to you. Yours to decide, and everyone knows it. Typical entries: brand positioning changes, pricing, anything with legal or contractual exposure, spend above the threshold, headcount.
Two things matter more than the specific allocations.
The first is that the thresholds must be numbers, not adjectives. “Reasonable spend” is not a decision right. “Up to £2,000 per month without asking” is. Every vague boundary gets resolved conservatively by the person who has more to lose from getting it wrong, which is never you.
The second is that this must not be static.
Decision rights are a schedule, not a settlement
A list that never changes is only marginally better than no list. If someone holds the same authority in month nine that they held on day one, you haven’t hired a function, you’ve hired an executor, and any decent marketer will leave.
So the page needs dates on it. Agree what moves from column three to column two at thirty days, and from column two to column one at ninety. Then actually revisit it, on the day, as a calendar item rather than a good intention.
This does something beyond the practical. It tells a new hire that the current constraints are a starting position and not a verdict on their judgement, which is exactly the reassurance an experienced person needs in a business where they haven’t yet built trust, and precisely the reassurance almost nobody gets.
The marketer’s part in it
There is one, and it’s consistent.
A marketer who arrives, notices that decision rights are undefined, and decides to raise it “once I’ve settled in” is making a real mistake. I’ve made it. New people don’t want to appear demanding, so they absorb the ambiguity, work around it, and hope clarity turns up on its own. It doesn’t. By the time it’s urgent enough to force, the relationship is already under strain and the conversation now sounds like a complaint rather than a request.
The practical implication for you is straightforward: your first marketing hire needs explicit, early, structured permission to tell you what isn’t working. Not a vague open door. A recurring slot, in the first month, where that’s the actual agenda.
Without it, you find out at the exit interview.
What this is worth getting right
If your last hire failed and you can’t produce a document showing what they were allowed to decide, you don’t yet know whether it was a people problem.
That’s not a comfortable conclusion, but it’s a useful one, because “I picked the wrong person” gives you nothing to change, and this takes an afternoon.
And the return on that afternoon is disproportionate. A marketer with clear authority starts moving in week one, rather than spending their first quarter working out where the edges are by touching them. Same person, same salary, several months of difference.
It also gives you the thing you were actually trying to buy when you decided to hire. Not more output. The ability to stop being the point through which every marketing decision has to pass.
That was always the goal. Decision rights are how you get it.