I thought we were hiring capacity. We hired a messenger. Here’s what I learned.

We had just taken Bud Authority from nothing toward a real book of business. The work was piling up — content that needed to go live, client sites that needed a technical look, broken links, a list of findings that had to get back to us and then to the client.

The obvious move was a person. Someone whose job was to post, crawl, check and come back with a report. I thought of it as an assistant seat. It was not. It was a messenger seat. We hired for it.

On paper, the seat looked clean. Open the CMS. Push the pages. Walk the site. Note what broke. Put it in a doc. Bring the doc to the people who could actually change the work. That is a full Tuesday if you write it that way. It is also a description of a courier route, not a production role.

About two months in, the work was still slow. Not because the person was a villain. Because the job we had designed was: Go find out, then come tell us. Every finding had to wait on a human to notice it, write it down and walk it across the room. The seat was supposed to add capacity. It added a queue.

I watched the queue form in small ways. A broken link sat until someone remembered to check. A missing page sat until someone opened the list.

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