Every growing company has one. The person new hires get sent to when the manual doesn't cover the situation. The one who trains the new rep on the side, films the tricky part of a job on their phone, and keeps the whole team pointed in the same direction. Nobody handed them a title. They just do it, because someone has to. If you want to become the process champion your company needs, start by understanding that the work is already happening. It just doesn't have a name yet.
I've watched this role show up in hundreds of businesses, and it's almost always invisible on the org chart. In an EOS® company it's the person who keeps the Process Component from being a binder nobody opens. Everywhere else it's whoever drew the short straw that week. The job is real, it's valuable, and in most companies it belongs to no one in particular. That's the opportunity.
What a process champion actually does
Forget the title for a second and look at the work. A process champion pulls knowledge out of the people who have it, turns that knowledge into something teachable, gets it in front of the team, and checks whether anyone actually uses it. That's the whole loop. Capture, deliver, measure, repeat.
Notice what that isn't. It isn't writing a three-hundred-page SOP binder and calling it done. Documentation stores knowledge. It doesn't transfer it. A library full of books doesn't teach anyone to read. The champion's job isn't to build a better filing cabinet. It's to make sure the way your best people work becomes the way everyone works.
The champion isn't the person who writes everything down. They're the person who makes sure what one expert knows ends up in everyone else's hands.
The three skills the job really requires
People assume this role is about being organized. Organization helps, but it isn't the core. Three skills matter more, and all three can be learned.
- Systems thinking. You have to see the business as a set of connected processes, not a pile of tasks. When something breaks, you ask where in the system it broke before you ask who to blame. Deming figured this out decades ago: roughly 80 percent of the time, the root cause is a process problem, not a people problem. A good champion reaches for the process first.
- Interviewing. The gold isn't on any form. It's in the judgment calls locked inside your expert's head: the exception they make on a Tuesday, the thing they check that nobody told them to check, the read they get on a customer in the first ten seconds. You don't get that by handing someone a template. You get it by sitting down and asking why, not just how.
- Video. People don't learn complex work from walls of text. They learn by watching. A ninety-second screen recording, or a phone video of your best tech doing the job, teaches more than three pages of bullet points, and it survives the fact that people forget about 70 percent of new information within a day. The champion knows how to capture the work as short, watchable video and put it where the work happens.
An SOP is a flat recipe card. Real wisdom is standing in the kitchen with the person who's cooked the dish a thousand times. The champion is the one who films the kitchen.
You're probably already doing this work
If any of this sounds like your Tuesday, you might already be the champion in everything but name. You're the one people interrupt with "how do we do this again?" You're the one who noticed the new hire was struggling and made a quick video instead of complaining about it. That instinct is the whole job. What's missing isn't the willingness. It's the recognition and the method.
Why giving the role a name matters
Here's the trap. When this work has no owner, it gets done part-time, badly, by too many people at once. It's the first thing dropped when the quarter gets busy. And the day your informal champion leaves, a huge chunk of how your company runs walks out the door with them, because it never lived anywhere but their head.
Naming the role changes that. It turns knowledge transfer from an accident into a system. It tells the champion that this is the job, not a favor they squeeze in between other jobs. And it gives everyone else one clear place to send the question, "how do we actually do this?" That's the missing seat on most org charts, and filling it is how companies stop depending on a few heroes and start depending on how they work.
How to make it official
If you're the person already doing this in the shadows, the move is to step into it on purpose and get recognized for it. If you're an owner and you can see your champion, the move is to name them and back them with real time and authority. Either way, the skill set is trainable. Systems thinking, structured interviewing, and quick video capture aren't talents you're born with. They're a method you can learn.
That's why we built a way to certify a process champion, so the person carrying this load has both the standing and the skills to do it well. If you want to see the tooling that makes the capture-and-deliver part fast, start with the platform. And if your processes are still scattered across heads and hallways, the Process page is a sensible first stop.
The businesses that break past founder dependence all do the same thing. They stop treating knowledge transfer as a chore nobody owns and give it to someone on purpose. That someone can be you.
Jon LoDuca
founder
PlaybookBuilder
