A VP of Support reviews the quarterly business review: CSAT up, response time down, AI deflection climbing. The CEO nods, then turns to Sales to discuss why the company’s largest customer just put their renewal on hold. Support had been tracking escalation patterns for that account for three months.
Support leadership in 2026 is harder—not because support leaders lack capability, competence, or commitment, but because the operating models used to lead support are becoming obsolete.
Demand continues to rise without corresponding authority to influence the decisions that create it—or proportional investment to absorb it. Product roadmap choices and sales incentives introduce complexity and customer friction faster than support capacity is allowed to grow.
For years, support leaders have responded by making it work—absorbing demand, preserving quality through effort, and shielding the business from impact. That response once reflected strength. Today, it keeps support trapped in a reactive posture—fixing what breaks instead of preventing breakage, compensating for poor adoption instead of surfacing why adoption fails. This limits support’s ability to translate customer signals into better product and go-to-market decisions.
“Make it work” has become support’s default operating model—and its greatest liability.
Consider what happens when a new product feature ships without adequate documentation. Support compensates—building internal guides, coaching customers through workarounds, absorbing the confusion. The team makes it work. Product never sees the full cost of the gap, so the pattern repeats. Three quarters later, support is carrying institutional knowledge for a dozen underdocumented features, and the business wonders why support costs keep rising.
The “make it work” model hides tradeoffs between growth commitments, commercial pressure, and the complexity customers are left to absorb. It suppresses signals about where customers struggle to adopt and realize value. And it teaches the organization that selling more matters more than ensuring customers can absorb what they already have.
This is not an execution problem. It is a leadership problem.
The Risk Has Shifted
Support has always been close to customer friction. What has changed is the risk that friction represents.
As products, pricing, and customer environments grow more complex, the gap between what is sold and what customers can realistically absorb has widened. When adoption stalls, value erodes, or expectations are missed, the impact appears in support long before it shows up in retention metrics or revenue reports.
Operating models built on absorbing downstream consequences once preserved stability. Today, they obscure risk—delaying visibility into where customer value is breaking down until friction becomes financial exposure. This is not an execution gap. It reflects a leadership model that no longer fits the environment support now operates in.
Technology Will Not Change the Outcome
Organizations respond to pressure by adding tools—self-service, automation, knowledge systems, AI. These investments improve efficiency, but when technology is used to compensate for structural deficiencies, it accelerates the same make-it-work model that limits support’s ability to engage customers at a higher level.
The constraint support faces was not created by technology—and it cannot be solved by it.
The Leadership Choice
Support leaders face a decision.
Continue operating as a pressure valve—absorbing demand, compensating for upstream decisions, and being measured by how well they keep problems contained.
Or refuse to compensate in ways that obscure risk—making friction visible, translating customer signals into business consequences, and allowing the organization to confront the tradeoffs it’s been avoiding.
The second path doesn’t require authority or reorganization. It begins with a single choice: stop shielding the business from the consequences of its own decisions.
Leadership Question
If the current operating model keeps support reactive, obscures risk, and suppresses the signals the business needs to see, what does continuing to “make it work” actually protect—and at what cost?
Up Next: From Reactive Support to Strategic Relevance: A Leadership Journey