A competing offer can reveal work a company has relied on without properly naming or rewarding. Before matching the salary or accepting the resignation, the founder should identify the decisions the employee already owns and decide whether the role, authority and pay should reflect them.
At 4:47 on Friday, Ama closed the design file on her laptop and asked Kojo for ten minutes. She was a UI/UX designer at his small Accra software company, known for keeping a paper sketchbook beside her keyboard and asking awkward questions before anyone wrote code.
Ama had received an offer in product operations. The salary was twice what Kojo paid her. She needed to respond after the weekend.
Ama and Kojo are invented composites, but the decision is familiar. A small company gives someone a design title, then quietly depends on her to resolve incomplete requirements, prepare customer calls and stop the team from building the wrong workflow. Another company eventually sees the broader job and prices it accordingly.
Kojo had until Monday to decide whether Ama had outgrown the company or whether the company had failed to understand her work.
The work hiding behind the design files
Kojo’s first reaction was financial. Matching the offer would shorten runway. Losing Ama would delay the next release and leave unfinished screens across two customer projects.
Neither calculation captured her contribution.
He opened the issue tracker and looked at the previous month. Ama had produced the expected flows and prototypes. She had also rewritten unclear acceptance criteria, noticed that two customers used different words for the same approval step, and persuaded the engineering lead to postpone a dashboard until the team understood who would act on its alerts.
None of those decisions appeared under “UI/UX design.” They appeared as comments, revised tickets and calls that ended without another week of engineering work.
This happens easily in small teams. The person closest to the interface becomes the person closest to every contradiction in the product. She sees where sales promises conflict with current behavior, where an automation needs a human exception, and where a customer says “simple” while describing four approval states.
If founders measure her by completed screens, they miss the judgment that made those screens worth building.
A counteroffer could preserve the wrong arrangement
By Saturday afternoon, Kojo had drafted a higher salary. It felt decisive. It also avoided the harder question.
Suppose Ama stayed under the same title. The team would continue sending her ambiguous work, expecting her to turn it into product decisions without formal authority. Engineers could still overrule her as “the designer.” Customer discussions could still happen before she joined. Her pay would change while the source of her frustration remained.
The product operations offer carried a clearer signal than the salary alone. Another company believed Ama could coordinate decisions across customer needs, product constraints and delivery. Kojo needed to assess whether that description already matched the work she was doing.
A useful review starts with recent decisions, rather than a list of tasks:
- Which decisions became clearer because this person was involved?
- What rework did the team avoid?
- Who already waits for her judgment before proceeding?
- Where does responsibility exceed formal authority?
- Would the company hire a designer if it had to replace everything she currently does?
That last question can be uncomfortable. Kojo’s honest answer was no. He would need design capacity, but he would also need someone to manage product ambiguity across sales, engineering and customer delivery.
The open role was larger than the title on Ama’s contract.
Monday still carried a real loss
By Sunday evening, the bad ending remained possible. Ama could leave, and Kojo could spend the next release cycle discovering her contribution through its absence.
A rushed counteroffer could make that outcome more likely. Doubling pay without explaining the role would sound reactive. Promoting her without changing decision rights would create a title that collapsed under the first disagreement.
This resembles the challenge in Esi’s design lead promotion: preserving judgment requires defining where that judgment applies. Salary recognizes value. Authority lets the person create it consistently.
Kojo prepared a different conversation for Monday. He separated three questions that founders often compress into one:
Could the company afford to retain Ama?
Did the company need the broader role she was already performing?
Did Ama want to keep doing that work there?
The third question mattered most because Kojo could not infer it from her performance. Ama might have enjoyed untangling product decisions. She might also have been doing it because nobody else would. A promotion built around unwanted work would solve the company’s problem by deepening hers.
Define the role before pricing it
On Monday morning, Kojo did not begin with a number. He placed a one-page role draft beside Ama’s sketchbook. It named the decisions he believed she already owned: clarifying workflows before engineering began, joining selected customer discovery calls, documenting product exceptions and challenging work that lacked a clear user action.
He asked her to cross out anything she did not want.
Only after they discussed the work did they discuss compensation, reporting lines and what the company could afford. The deadline remained hers, and leaving remained a reasonable choice.
That is the founder’s real task when an offer arrives. Do not treat retention as an auction for the same job. Use the moment to inspect the job the company has actually created.
Before your next one-to-one, open the last month of tickets, call notes and product changes. Find one employee whose judgment appears everywhere while her title appears nowhere. Write down the decisions she already makes, then ask whether she wants the authority to keep making them.
Comments
No comments yet.