I once spent days writing detailed job descriptions for my team.
Responsibilities, processes, standards, edge cases, even a description of what a great result looked like. Some ran for several pages.
I was proud of them. Everyone read them once. Then nobody opened them again.
I can’t really blame them. Reading your responsibilities is a bit like reading the instructions before starting a game. Necessary at the beginning, but not something that keeps your attention once the work starts.
That was when I began to see that a job description and a pay formula are different tools.
A job description explains the role in full. It matters when someone is learning the job, understanding the processes, and seeing where their responsibility begins and ends. But it doesn’t necessarily keep a person focused from week to week.
When a document says that twenty things are important, it gives very little direction about which three deserve attention first.
A pay formula has to do the opposite. It takes all that detail and reduces it to a small number of clear outcomes: what matters most, what the person can genuinely influence, and how much weight each result should carry.
That distinction shaped the way I designed PayByResult.
It would have been easy to let AI produce a long list of metrics for every role. More metrics make the result look thorough and sophisticated.
But a formula where everything counts can leave the person with the same problem as a long job description: plenty of information, but no real priority.
So PayByResult is designed to suggest fewer metrics. They should be specific, measurable, and weighted by their actual importance.
The AI provides the structure. The owner still decides what deserves attention and what should affect pay, because only the owner understands the real priorities of the business.
I noticed something else when I started working this way.
A few clear targets didn’t limit good employees. They gave them room to decide how to reach the result. Instead of repeatedly guessing what I expected, they could use their own judgment, creativity, and strengths within a clear area of responsibility.
A long document tells someone everything they might need to do. A good pay formula tells them what to aim at.
Have you ever written a careful role description and watched it get read once, then quietly forgotten?