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The glue is the work
Tech orgs only function thanks to people who volunteer for thankless "glue work." This is the space where UX lives; for the field to get respect we need to make this work visible.
Howdy, picnickers!
Over the past couple of weeks we’ve talked about a top-down way of running teams that, while prevalent, doesn’t really work. But in the gaps left by shoddy management, something else emerges – and I’d like to dedicate this issue to talking about it.
I’m referring to glue work – the invisible and unrewarded contributions without which nothing else works. Charity Majors discusses these concepts in a great thread on Bluesky and links to an older article by Tanya Reilly that gives a good rundown of the topic.
But in short – the glue work is the stuff between documented, tangible, deliverable tasks. It’s the meetings, the coordination, the collaboration that makes sure people are working on the right thing.
This is the stuff that gets shredded by layoffs. Then it’s never replaced because managers don’t see it on their dashboards and don’t think about it. It’s highly contextual – what worked in person suddenly stops working when teams go remote, which makes managers think “it must be because remote doesn’t work.”
The Timeline
The concept of glue work shows up a lot throughout software development discourse, where there is a perception that one can become a “10x engineer” and simply do all the work themselves.
In its unending search for respect, UX Design has tried to copy this notion (the unicorn designer, should designers code, blah blah) without understanding that the outputs of design are not mockups in Figma, but mental models. All of our work is glue work, because the ultimate objective is to get someone else to build the thing we envisioned and for that to happen the thing must live in their head.
In an organization with good shared understanding and rich multimodal communication, most artifacts can afford to be rough.
Of course the 10x engineer is also an illusion. 10x engineers make the system as a whole slower. Just like every other notion of the “superman of productivity” in history, it is nonsense. We don’t produce anything worthwhile by our lonesome – only together.
The job of the developer is to create systems, not churn out code by the pound. A designer rapidly chucking outputs into the world emulates not a mythical 10x engineer but a different and very real character: the Net Negative Programmer.
And yet, the notion that “glue people don’t ship, so we should get rid of them” is prevalent among output-focused orgs (which, let’s face it, is still most of them). It’s common precisely because the outputs of glue work are invisible. In the case of Product and UX, we do have outputs – visual artifacts like mockups or roadmaps – but the output is just the visible component of an invisible web of agreements and alignment.
UX won’t get respect by emulating a mythical kind of programmer; we cannot overcome impostor syndrome by transforming ourselves into blowhards.
We can only get respect on our own terms, with a philosophy of work that centers what we value.
Being a designer, what you really signed up for is caring.
Instead of joining the crowd that looks down our work, we should be making our valuable work visible. Working in public is a common notion among devs (open source, etc) but not so much for us; one of the cool things about LinkedIn recently has been the surge in other functions openly sharing what they are working on and how.
Work in the open. Tag in your coworkers. Make decisions together, and make the rules for making decisions together. Kill the silo in your head.
Reading Material
The conversation around glue work is topical partly because we have such a great case study for what happens when you don’t have any of it. It’s AI in general, but one specific high-profile application of AI in particular. And predictably, it’s a train wreck – because while AI can do tasks, it cannot do the work of connecting those tasks together into a coherent whole.
Automation isn’t necessarily bad. It’s the systems that exploit workers, and deliver shoddy products to customers.
It’s impossible to open a browser without tripping over stories about new AI tools that will transform everything. But the tools don’t matter and they never have. The AI tools that promise to make us faster merely take away our power to decide and leave us with doing all the glue work necessary to align ambivalent stakeholders around those decisions. The hardest and most draining part of the work, in other words, is still left to the humans. Instead of the AI doing our laundry, it is the other way around.
But glue work is draining only because it is so looked down upon. Forget about notions of productivity that center on stuff and tools. Center the process and the people. Eileen Wang’s reflection on her career journey is a beautiful example of just that – highlighting and celebrating the communities and the people who created them. Give it a read for an uplifting start to your week.
— Pavel at the Product Picnic