Or, the surprisingly complicated process of asking what your job is.
It started in August 2025. A woman accepted a position as Digital Marketing Manager at a company. After years of being responsible for entire marketing departments, she was excited to have a more defined role, a boss, and an actual team.
Adorable.
By September, she had a question. “Hey, leadership! What exactly is my job? And what’s my boss’s job? And who is responsible for what?” A reasonable question, she thought. The company thought it was a wonderful question to revisit at a later date.
October 2025: The Website
The website started crashing. There were migrations, late-night phone calls, 60-plus-hour workweeks, and a digital marketing manager who was rapidly becoming an unpaid IT department. She explained that the website was unstable, the company needed technical support, and none of this was particularly sustainable.
Around this time, an outside agency proposed a website redesign for more than $200,000. Our protagonist, who apparently hadn’t learned to mind her business, suggested they could probably avoid spending that much money. She could improve the existing website, but she would really need some technical support.
This would become a recurring theme.
November–December 2025: A Promotion, Spiritually
By November, she was doing her digital marketing job, coordinating the team, building reporting dashboards, working on Salesforce, developing the following year’s strategy, and figuring out how to keep the website functional. She was also still asking what her job was.
Eventually, she decided to rebuild the website herself. Not because anyone had formally assigned her a major website development project, but because marketing without a functioning website was proving somewhat challenging. She continued requesting technical support, clarification around responsibilities, and an actual direction for the department.
Leadership assured her that everything would make more sense in the new year. In the meantime, she should go ahead and lead the team. Without formally becoming their manager.
Obviously.
January 2026: The Beer
The new year arrived. Things did not make more sense.
After several conversations about roles, responsibilities, leadership, and compensation, she was invited to have a beer with the CEO. He was surprised to hear about her concerns, assured her she could come directly to him in the future, and even suggested making their conversations a monthly occurrence.
Progress!
The following day, a meeting appeared on her calendar with the CEO and her boss. During that meeting, she learned several fascinating things. She was overconfident. She was small-minded. She had done her job too well. She had done too much. The company didn’t know what to do with her. Her boss had apparently overpromised, but she was exaggerating her contributions.
She also learned that not knowing where one person’s job ended and another person’s began was perfectly normal (ambiguity for the win!). It was how people proved themselves. And while the company appreciated all her work, it did not pay for work already performed.
It was, objectively, a remarkable amount of information to discover approximately 24 hours after being encouraged to speak openly.
There was some good news, though. If she took on major projects outside her responsibilities in the future, the company might consider additional compensation.
She made a mental note.
February–April 2026: Character Development
She received a raise and a new leadership role. She also wrote job descriptions for the team, continued requesting technical support, managed major initiatives, and asked whether the company might consider a project bonus for the particularly enormous Salesforce implementation.
No.
Well, at least that was a clear answer.
Over the following months, she continued raising concerns about project management, spending, communication, accountability, and the overall effectiveness of the department. She also continued asking for IT support.
At this point, someone really should have made her a T-shirt.
May–June 2026: The Plot Twist
Her boss was let go. This was interesting because she had already taken responsibility for much of the marketing department’s work. Surely, this would be the moment when the company clarified the structure, formally recognized her responsibilities, and finally provided the support she had been requesting.
The CEO explained that her former boss had been too big for the organization. She, on the other hand, was still thinking too small.
A fascinating Goldilocks situation.
She was informed that she would not be leading the department in the way previous marketing leaders had. When she raised concerns about being treated differently from the men who had held comparable leadership positions, including concerns about compensation, access, and respect, she was encouraged to give the company time to figure things out.
She was also reminded that employees needed to prove themselves before receiving titles or compensation.
Camera pans slowly to the website she built, the department she was running, and the projects she had already delivered.
Summer 2026: Business as Usual
For the next several months, she continued doing the work. She developed a major product campaign, managed the marketing team, worked on Salesforce, supported the website, attended a trade show, answered questions outside business hours, built systems, and solved problems.
She loved a surprising amount of it. The work was challenging, creative, and genuinely meaningful to her. The team mattered to her. The company mattered to her. Which was probably why she kept trying to make things better.
She was not included in executive meetings. She did not have the same access to board presentations that previous male marketing leaders had enjoyed. She still lacked the support she had requested nearly a year earlier. But she kept going, because according to the company, demonstrating what you could do was how you earned the opportunity to do it officially.
And she was nothing if not committed to following instructions.
September 2026: The Season Finale
Fourteen months after accepting a job because she wanted a more defined role, she decided to put everything in writing. She outlined her responsibilities, the leadership work she had taken on, the support she needed, and the compensation she believed was appropriate.
She documented more than 260 hours of Salesforce work and over 200 hours of website development. She asked for a clear reporting structure, defined responsibilities, and formal recognition of the work she had already been performing.
Essentially, she asked the same questions she had been asking since September 2025. Only this time, she included the receipts.
A meeting was scheduled to discuss her proposal. One week later, she arrived for that meeting. The CEO thanked her for the proposal.
Then he terminated her employment.
Side note: they finally hired IT support, he started 1 day before her termination.. the irony.
No reason was provided. Her system access was removed before she left the parking lot, including access to work she had hoped to use in her professional portfolio. She was offered severance in exchange for signing an agreement that would release certain legal claims and impose restrictions on what she could disclose.
She declined.
The Credits
So, what have we learned?
Well, she started as a Digital Marketing Manager because she wanted a job with clearly defined responsibilities. She spent the next fourteen months asking for those responsibilities to be defined. She was told to prove herself, so she proved herself. She was told she had done too much, so she kept working. She was told that compensation for additional projects could be discussed, so she asked to discuss it.
She was fired.
And now, suddenly, she knows exactly what she’s responsible for at that company.
Absolutely nothing.
Which is fortunate, because the health insurance is gone, the paycheck isn’t coming, and she has a website to build.
Her own, this time.
And after fourteen months of being told to communicate, she discovered that the one thing she could finally do without asking permission was talk.
Of course, now they might call it gossip.
Cut to black.
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