We use the term “Lead” instead of “Manager” as our term for folks with other “Peeps” reporting to them.
We’re a company of builders: people who love building products, teams, and businesses. We try to center our culture around this, and celebrate and venerate folks doing the work that moves things forward. At the end of the day, the entire rest of the organization’s job is setting them up for success.
It’s easy to get confused and optimize for the “Manager” class, with pretense and process that work well for the Bosses, but ultimately corrode the experience for the people doing things. We’re doing our best to avoid this!
This philosophy is reflected in a lot of things, including our aversion to baroque titles, mindfulness of “maker time” schedules, and preserving a strong IC growth track. But perhaps most of all, it’s reflected in how we see the role of Leads.
This doesn’t mean Leads aren’t important or that the work isn’t meaningful – quite to the contrary. Leads are vital to the success of our team.
The job of a Lead is to help a team do their best work. To the extent a Lead is “developing strategy” or having lots of meetings, those things only matter if they’re unlocking or unblocking the builders on the team.
And indeed, the impact and performance of a Lead is ultimately measurable through the output of their peeps. Highly effective teams are more than the sum of their parts. One simply cannot be a great Lead if they don’t have a stunning team, and they aren’t executing at the top of their game.
This means that as a Lead, you need to be mindful of your team’s goals, where each person is at, and what they need to succeed. You need to be making sure their work is going great, that they are working well with others, and where those things aren’t happening, bear the burden of fixing it.
The role of a People Lead is meaningfully different than being an IC, and not something to be taken on or granted without purposeful dedication to that path. If someone is becoming a People Lead, they should be inherently interested in that work and internalize that they have a different job now. It’s not something to hand out as a medal or gold star!
This militates against the common pattern of “I” shaped reporting structures, where a high-performing IC is given one or two reports. This often happens because the current Lead is strapped for management bandwidth, or they want to show some career growth to someone on their team.
But this setup almost never works. That “Lead” is probably thinking of their job mostly as an IC, and not approaching the unique challenges of a Lead with intention, purpose, and learning. They are likely managing junior people who need help and coaching – but they don’t know how to do that. They’re having to ramp on context like feedback and comp for one person – absorbing all of that overhead for minimal outcome. It also complicates performance and comp conversations (are they being measured as an IC or Lead?) and makes for a bloated Lead layer.
In situations like this it’s usually better to put that high-performing IC in a “Team Lead” role (in Eng we’d call this “Tech Lead”) where they can steer projects, provide day-to-day direction, and gain exposure – but aren’t expected to be the actual people manager. Yes this means more reports for the senior Lead, but that’s part of being in a flat organization.
Every team is different – they have different goals, communication styles, and cultural norms. A great Lead can take the bottoms-up input from their team on what works best for them, and marry that effectively with their leadership style and company values to develop team incredible chemistry. The outcomes from this kind of work will shape things like 1:1 structure, internal documentation, feedback cycles, recognition, team meetings, and everything in between. They have the ability and awareness to adjust these norms as the shape and needs of their team changes over time.
Our expectation isn’t that every team’s culture is the same but rather that it is representative of what that team needs to receive/share effective feedback, exceed their goals, and ultimately be in a position to do incredible things (and have some fun doing it!). We want folks here to do their best work as individuals, but more importantly as a part of a high performance team they love being a part of.