Your Head of Tech Shouldn’t Be Your IT Person
Brands Need to Split Technical Roles Before They Burn Out Their Best People
Your ‘Head of Tech’ is on a client call... but also fielding Slack messages about a broken printer and someone’s email password. Sound familiar?
Too many brands bundle strategic tech leadership and day-to-day IT support into the same role. It feels efficient in the short term; one person, one salary. But the reality? You end up stalling big projects, exhausting your most capable people, and confusing the rest of the business about what “tech” actually does.
Splitting these roles isn’t a luxury, it’s the only way to keep momentum and prevent your entire tech function from falling apart.
The Two Jobs Everyone Muddles Together
Here’s the problem: two completely different jobs are often rolled into one.
A Head of Tech should be thinking about systems strategy, selecting vendors, leading automation projects, and coaching junior ops or systems staff. IT support, on the other hand, is about device management, user onboarding, email setups, and fixing office connectivity issues.
These are not the same job. They require different skill sets, mindsets, and energy. Asking one person to straddle both is a shortcut that always catches up with you.
What Happens When You Don’t Split Them
When you collapse leadership and support into one role, one person gets stretched impossibly thin. Strategic work slips down the priority list because someone’s laptop won’t turn on. You burn out the doers, or promote them into roles they aren’t suited for. The rest of the business ends up confused about what tech should be delivering.
We’ve seen brands where the so-called ‘Tech Director’ has no team. They’re fixing laptops and trying to write ERP flows in the same hour. That’s not sustainable, for them or for the business.
How to Structure Tech Roles in Fast-Growth Brands
There’s a better way. Most scaling brands benefit from a three-tiered model.
At the base, IT or Tech Ops handle helpdesk support, everything from device management to user issues. Above them, a systems team focuses on business processes and platforms, configuring ERPs, building flows, and managing integrations. And at the top sits a Head of Tech who drives the strategy, oversees projects, orchestrates vendors, and keeps the roadmap on track.
It doesn’t need to be a bloated org chart. But splitting accountability makes the whole machine run smoother.
What to Do If You’re Already in the Mess
If your Head of Tech is still fixing printers, you’re not alone. Signs include constant context switching, leadership work slipping, and nobody officially owning IT. The first step is to audit the workload, how much time is going to IT, to systems, and to strategy?
From there, decide what to outsource, and give your systems admins room to grow into leaders. Finally, free up your Head of Tech so they can lead, not fix.
Why This Matters Now
As brands scale, so does operational complexity. What worked when you were ten people in a shared office won’t cut it when you’re a hundred people running multiple channels and markets.
Splitting these roles doesn’t add bureaucracy. It reduces friction. It ensures your tech team can deliver strategy without being dragged into password resets.
At Commerce Thinking, we help brands design tech functions that can scale without burning people out or bottlenecking progress.
Need help auditing or structuring your tech function?
Splitting these roles isn’t about adding overhead. It’s about giving your tech team the space to do the job you hired them for. Strategy shouldn’t be derailed by a password reset.
I’ve been in boardrooms at some of the fastest and most impressive brands out there, and this problem comes up more often than you’d think. I share those lessons (and the fixes that actually work) over on LinkedIn.
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