How to Write Your Current Responsibilities

What are Current Responsibilities?

Current Responsibilities describe the outcomes you own, not how you fulfill them. As you're writing, stick to answering "What are you responsible for?" and not "How do you accomplish do those things?"

You'll be tempted to get into your processes, but avoid getting into those details.

We want to help managers answer:

If there's a problem with [business function], who do I talk to?
Have I been clear in communication with what my employees are responsible for?
Is there a responsibility gap on the team?

It's not a system to define low-level tasks or describe the processes you follow to do your job. It's also not a list of all your frequent activities.

So, if you find your Current Responsibilities really short, leaving you thinking, "This doesn't look like I do much," you've probably written them well. In fact, most people in most organizations are likely to only have one current responsibility.

See below for some examples of what you might be inclined to write and how you can edit it to stick to the outcome you own.

Examples

Here's something a product manager might think to write.

I'm responsible for creating and implementing the product development process, shaping the work that comes next, and proposing the key points for how we market the new features.

I determine product usage queries to run to understand how our product is being used, which features are used, and which features are not used and by whom.

I make sure projects stay on track for the deadline set for the project.

Here's how you can simplify that to stick to the ultimate responsibility and not the things you do along the way to fulfill that responsibility.

Determine what gets built in the product.

Let's do QA.

I'm responsible for testing all product development and approving its readiness to be shipped.

That sounds right, but it could be a little more precise. Testing is how you fulfill that responsibility. You're not testing for the sake of testing—you're testing because you're responsible for the quality of the product that gets shipped.

Ensure we ship a quality product.

Customer Support might look something like this.

I'm responsible for creating the customer support strategy, implementing the processes, tooling, and establishing key metrics to indicate our performance. I create all help docs, including both methodology guides and step-by-step, screenshot walk-throughs for how to use Khorus. I answer all inbound support emails and calls of all levels of support, from reset passwords to very technically involved scenarios that might require scripts to be run on the server to solve the customer's problem. I also monitor error-reporting tools and initiate outbound calls when I see fit.

Yes, it makes good sense that you create a strategy, implement good processes and tools, but these things service the actual responsibility. The responsibility is simply:

Communicate answers and fixes to all customers' questions about the using the app and problems they have with the app.

And Customer Success.

I'm responsible for defining the strategy and delivery of Customer Success services, delivering the Khorus Onboarding service (now Kickstart Success and Follow Through), ongoing consulting with a focus on goal-setting strategy training and feedback, and enabling a successful Khorus implementation.

The responsibility gets whittled down to: Enable a successful implementation in the customer's entire organization.