The case for a dedicated “Ways of Working“ role.
In my last post I wondered why the job market keeps treating “Ways of Working People“ as ”overhead”. These are people focused on how work gets done, separate from the people who create and deliver it. Separating the ”how” from the ”what” is, of course, a false dichotomy, because the people doing the work should own how it’s done, too. So why is the improvement part often lacking?
I’ve lost count of how many times a team has told me oh, we can’t change that
. That sentence always makes me curious. If there’s a blocker, a dependency, or a working relationship issue, why go to a dedicated ”Ways of Working Person” instead of the manager? Great question. A good manager already removes blockers and reads team dynamics. That’s the job.
I think it comes down to mandate. Who’s allowed to change things? How many people need to sign off first? How much hassle do you have to wade through before anything moves?
Some issues sit outside what any one manager can hold, no matter how good they are. A blocker between two teams belongs to nobody’s roadmap. A pattern that shows up in every retro is different from a surface-level, one-off issue a manager fixes and moves past. Sometimes the manager is the issue, and the person raising it needs to talk to someone with no formal power over them.
None of this is a competence gap, but a systemic one. Changing our habits is notoriously difficult, and there are always forces resisting it. Someone has to act as connective tissue between teams, managers, cultures, and time zones, full-time, not squeezed in between planning and one-on-ones. And that someone needs the mandate to actually act on what they find, not just notice it. This work is not optional. It’s capability building.
That’s the case for a dedicated role, alongside managers, covering ground no single manager’s span of control was ever meant to cover. I explored a related idea, AI-empowered triads needing ”tribal leaders”, in an earlier post.
Marty Cagan (the author of several influential books) has an article about ”process people”: people who scale companies with process. That’s not what I mean. I’m not talking about someone coming in with a process and rolling it out across the organisation. I’m talking about people-owned, living ways of working: simplifying things, noticing where structural or cultural problems are getting in the way, and helping the people doing the work address them.
Improving that is not ”overhead” or ”waste”; it’s a way of identifying and minimising waste in product development. Marty’s ”makers” and ”managers” can sometimes do this well. When they can’t, that’s the gap a ”Ways of Working Person” fills. And I agree with Marty that it’s helpful if that person has been a ”maker”.
Special thanks to a few ex-colleagues for the conversations that inspired this post.
I keep putting ”Ways of Working Person” in quotes because I genuinely don’t have a better name for it. The job market doesn’t have a name for it, at least not one that captures what I mean. Some of you reading this have that job without the corresponding title. (Phil Karlton was not wrong when he said naming things is hard.)
Help me out, let’s keep at it.