What came to my mind as I read this: some people want to work to make work easy. Others just want the work to be easy. They don’t see the full picture, because they prefer the simplified worldview.
This is so well written; thank you for taking the time to articulate it in such detail. I fired off about this last week on LinkedIn but have been trying to figure out how to put into words the depth behind the frustration I was feeling when people were talking about creating "AI Chief of Staffs" and you nailed it.
John, thank you so much for putting this together. Layoffs because of AI "productivity gains" tend to be an executive no-brainer and the first thing that they might ask for.
But ironically, and as you described very well, the structural effects of glue people being laid off can probably only be connected to the cause by the very glue people that got pushed out. Because they understood and could factor in the subtle signals, the right framing, the right level of detail - and make the connections others are struggling to see.
I can tell that this is a topic you deeply care about as you put in the introduction. And as someone who appreciates complexity and is allergic to simple answers, I really like your general approach to always look at the full picture.
This is so it regarding AI thinking. Now if I can only persuade more leaders to read this in the face of “I’m a leader, I don’t have enough time to read this.” Hmmm… maybe an AI summarization will do, human-in-the-loop of course 😆
Amazing article. Articulates so many ideas that, as a leader of “glue people” I struggle to get across to others. I am constantly fighting the notion that AI is the death knell of Product Management and this gives me more ways to explain why the core purpose of PM becomes even more essential.
The glue people question has a sharp test case: what happens to coordination overhead the week after a glue person leaves, before any replacement process exists? In my experience running multiple companies, that week tells you whether the role was creating value or absorbing dysfunction that should have been fixed upstream. Did you find a reliable pattern for which it was?
Excellent piece. The COM frame is so useful.
What came to my mind as I read this: some people want to work to make work easy. Others just want the work to be easy. They don’t see the full picture, because they prefer the simplified worldview.
This is so well written; thank you for taking the time to articulate it in such detail. I fired off about this last week on LinkedIn but have been trying to figure out how to put into words the depth behind the frustration I was feeling when people were talking about creating "AI Chief of Staffs" and you nailed it.
This is perhaps the biggest function glue people do without realizing.
“Absorbing role ambiguity. Stepping into gaps between job descriptions that nobody had formalized, taking ownership where ownership was unclear.”
Very well written. Such a great take. One of my favourite pieces of your writing.
Preach. So well written.
John, thank you so much for putting this together. Layoffs because of AI "productivity gains" tend to be an executive no-brainer and the first thing that they might ask for.
But ironically, and as you described very well, the structural effects of glue people being laid off can probably only be connected to the cause by the very glue people that got pushed out. Because they understood and could factor in the subtle signals, the right framing, the right level of detail - and make the connections others are struggling to see.
I can tell that this is a topic you deeply care about as you put in the introduction. And as someone who appreciates complexity and is allergic to simple answers, I really like your general approach to always look at the full picture.
This is so it regarding AI thinking. Now if I can only persuade more leaders to read this in the face of “I’m a leader, I don’t have enough time to read this.” Hmmm… maybe an AI summarization will do, human-in-the-loop of course 😆
Amazing article. Articulates so many ideas that, as a leader of “glue people” I struggle to get across to others. I am constantly fighting the notion that AI is the death knell of Product Management and this gives me more ways to explain why the core purpose of PM becomes even more essential.
The glue people question has a sharp test case: what happens to coordination overhead the week after a glue person leaves, before any replacement process exists? In my experience running multiple companies, that week tells you whether the role was creating value or absorbing dysfunction that should have been fixed upstream. Did you find a reliable pattern for which it was?