Everything was my job.
Infrastructure design. Site availability. Three different operations groups. Hiring. Security. Domains. Office wiring. Cooling. Data-center rebuilds. Budgets. Networks. Capacity. Disaster planning. Technical escalations.
The list kept going.
I sent it to my boss because the breadth had become a problem. The responsibilities were manageable when I joined. Shutterstock kept growing, the operations environment needed more structure, and new work kept attaching itself to the same person.
Me.
Then my name started coming up as a bottleneck.
That was frustrating. I was working hard and producing a lot. I had also accepted so many ownership gaps that the company now depended on me to move unrelated things at once.
The second half of my note described the job I thought I should be doing: create stable systems, set standards, build a strong team, give people career paths, improve technical culture, plan for continuity, and design the next version of the infrastructure.
That work needed uninterrupted thought. It was difficult to do while also handling office cooling, last-minute staffing changes, every purchase, and every escalation that did not have another obvious owner.
Those were leadership responsibilities. The first list was leadership plus every loose cable in the building.
Growth creates this problem quietly. A capable person keeps catching work because dropping it would hurt the company. Eventually the pile becomes evidence that the person cannot keep up.
I had helped create the pile by saying yes. The company had helped by continuing to ask. Fixing it required an honest look at both.
I wanted to fix that before frustration turned into failure.
Writing the list down was the start.