Too many managers, too few makers: who actually does the work?

How it happens

Nobody plans it. Each new role seems reasonable on its own: someone to coordinate clients, someone to manage the roadmap, someone to report to the board. But every coordinating role creates meetings, requests and documents that land on the makers’ desks. Their time fragments, their focus disappears and the very work all this coordination exists to support slows down.

Keep management close to the craft

I believe management works best when it stays close to the work. Leaders who still understand design or code, who can look at a screen and see what is wrong, make better decisions and need fewer meetings to make them. That doesn’t mean managers have to do the work themselves. It means they should understand it well enough to protect it rather than just track it.

Protect the makers’ time

The other half is protecting the people who build. Long, uninterrupted blocks of time, fewer status meetings, clear priorities and someone who absorbs the noise instead of passing it on. On my team, a large part of my job is exactly that: taking the coordination onto myself so that designers and developers can actually design and develop.

A simple question

When a project feels slow, I often ask a simple question: who here actually makes things, and how much of their week do they spend making them? The answer is usually revealing. Fixing it rarely requires more people. It requires fewer obstacles between the people who are already there and the work they were hired to do.