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Solutions leaders are in more rooms than they used to be. More conversations with leaders across the business, more influence in product decisions, more pull in how the business thinks about what comes next.
And most still can’t answer the question the CFO will eventually ask: what does your function own?
Not contribute to. Own.
The profession has always been better at proving its value inside someone else’s outcome than building something it can point to independently. Two things are changing that and the leaders who recognize them are the ones who will finally have a clean answer to that question.
Product can’t. Sales can’t. Solutions can.
Product teams know the technology but are too far removed from live customer environments. Marketing operates at too high a level. Sales knows the business outcome but cannot build the proof. Customer Success knows the customer but enters after the decision is made.
Solutions sits at the intersection of all three - technical depth, live customer reality, and business outcome accountability - every day, in every deal. No other function holds all three simultaneously.
The market has changed what it demands. Buyers are not arriving with curiosity anymore. They arrive with a shortlist already ranked and one question: can you prove this works in my environment? Boards and executives are asking a version of that question internally. How is AI actually landing in customer environments? Where are buying cycles stalling? Which workflows are breaking?
They keep going to Solutions, not because Solutions asked for the responsibility, but because Solutions is the only function with the data. When that dynamic repeats enough times, the scope follows.
Stop reporting activity. Start owning outcomes.
Most Solutions leaders report metrics up the chain. Technical win rates. POV conversion. Attached revenue. The organizations that have built that measurement infrastructure are ahead of the ones still counting demos.
But there is a difference between metrics that describe activity and metrics that connect to what the CRO and CFO are already tracking. One leader running a large global SE organization put it this way: the only two metrics worth taking to the CRO are net new ARR and technical win coverage relative to quota. Everything else is activity data dressed up as performance data. Activity data gives the business permission to treat you like overhead.
The headcount conversation works the same way. The AE-to-SC ratio is a coverage metric being used as a value question. As long as that’s the lens, Solutions will keep being resourced like a support function. The right question is where the function changes the outcome in a way nothing else could. Where does your involvement turn a deal that shouldn’t close into one that does? That is the number worth building toward.
Leah McTiernan at DocuSign named the obligation at our Virtual Kickoff: “As solution executives, we should be using our data to show that we’re not a support function, but we’re a measurable growth engine for the business. And that, I think, as leaders, is our job right now.”
The data is there. Most teams just are not framing it in a way the business can act on.
The remit is expanding whether you’re ready or not.
Metrics get you credibility. Owning scope gets you authority. And right now, scope is accumulating around Solutions whether leaders are actively building for it or not.
One leader at our recent conference, Off the Record, described how his role had shifted over 18 months. He went from owning the SE function to being a standing participant in M&A diligence, a voice in marketing leadership, a presence in investor analyst meetings. None of it was planned. The business kept needing someone who could speak to what was actually happening with customers at a technical and commercial level simultaneously. His function kept being the answer until the scope settled around it.
The categories repeat across the SolutionExec network: sales specialist teams moving under Solutions ownership, innovation mandates where Solutions leads the build-vet-scale cycle, product feedback loops with real commercial weight, M&A diligence where evaluating whether a target’s technology holds up in a live customer environment is exactly what Solutions does every day.
Two leaders who have navigated this expansion described it the same way: you prove yourself, the organization sees it, and the opportunities come. At that point you have a choice: stay comfortable, or pick it up.
When Solutions owns a function or a decision category, the output belongs to Solutions without a translation layer. The specialist team’s performance is a Solutions number. The innovation mandate’s output is a Solutions deliverable. The function has things it built, decisions it made, outcomes it is accountable for and the business can see them without anyone having to explain what “attached ARR” means.
Own something. Or watch someone else do it.
Taking on expanded scope without a plan is how leaders get buried. The remit grows, the expectations grow, and the function absorbs more work without gaining structural authority.
The leaders doing this well treat each new ownership category as a business problem. What does this function need to look like to run this well? What does success look like in ninety days? What does the executive team need to see to confirm the bet was right? Those are not questions you answer after the scope arrives. You show up with them before it does.
Gokul Sridharan of Katalon, who was in the room at Off the Record, named the gap in his recap of the event: “The cost center vs. value engine debate is over. We just haven’t won it yet. Solutions orgs don’t support revenue. They generate it. Until we own the metrics that prove it, we’ll keep fighting for the seat we’ve already earned.”
Owning the metrics and owning the scope are the same fight. The data that proves the growth engine thesis is harder to build when everything Solutions touches belongs to someone else’s outcome.
If your organization handed you a new function tomorrow, would you know what to do with it? If the answer is not immediate, that is the work.
We hosted Off the Record last week in New York City. Eighty Solutions leaders in one room having candid conversations that can only happen in a room of peers. The names and details of those conversations stay off the record, but we’ll be sharing our takeaways and key insights for the profession in the weeks ahead.
If you want to get involved in the meantime:
Join our virtual roundtables. Sixty minutes with an intentionally small and curated group of your peers on relevant topics. Upcoming sessions are available at solutionexec.com/roundtables.
Join the network. Sign up at solutionexec.com to start receiving our executive content and get invited to upcoming events.
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