Friends,

Just like that, it’s July.

I hope my northern hemisphere friends are staying safe from the heat waves, and I hope my southern hemisphere friends are staying warm (it’s been a pretty mild 22C/71F here).

It’s just started snowing in Australia’s alps and I’m keeping my fingers (and toes) crossed that the same happens in New Zealand, when I’m there in a couple of weeks.

Today I’m taking a break from tradition, stepping outside comp, and exploring one path that leadership appears to be evolving towards, due in large part to AI.

I’ve said this a lot lately, but it’s one of the most exciting times to be in the People profession, thanks to myriad ways in which we’re now able to re-imagine work.

Enjoy this week’s edition ✌️

Matt

In case you’re new here (or just missed it) here’s the past three editions of the FNDN Series:

When HR and IT don't talk, people fall through the cracks. This guide fixes the handoffs that matter most.

Interested in sponsoring the FNDN Series? Drop me a line!

Know a startup Head of People looking for answers 🙋 why not forward this to them for some instant karma? ✨

Lately, it’s felt like the role of a traditional manager is under threat. And while this isn’t a new story, a few things have popped up recently that are making it all feel a bit extra.

Let’s look at some examples:

But if managers are fewer, and their teams are larger, doesn’t something have to give?

(Afterall, you can’t just remove managers and wish everyone luck — Google already tried that).

The answer appears to be a new kind of manager. One that will require more than two pizzas.

Mixed in with the mentions of fewer managers, bigger teams, is a new term. One borrowed from sportfield. 

So I wanted to explore this role a bit more to both get a sense of what it is, and understand how it changes from the ‘traditional manager’ role.

On face value, I kinda get it.

Reflecting on my past couple of manager roles, one of the things I missed most was doing the work. At times, I used to get jealous at what my team would ship (while also being very proud of them).

This feeling was only exacerbated once AI came onto the scene, and one of the things I now love about my pursuits as a solopreneur is that I can actually do the work.

So at a glance, this jibes with me, too.

But before I give this a big tick, I thought I should explore what a player-coach actually is, and how it changes from a traditional manager.

A traditional managers focus typically falls into three buckets. Firstly, they’re the people coordinator, handling the flow of work and information from the team to the organisation. Secondly, they’re a supervisor and coach to their direct reports. Third, and this is often the most contentious one from my perspective, they’re contributors in their own right.

The player-coach drops the people coordination entirely, and doubles down on contributing to the team's work in their own right (the craft), while also developing and growing the expertise of what is now a larger team of direct reports.

The craft and development pieces are fairly self explanatory, but what is ‘people coordination’, and where does it go?

You can think of it as the work of keeping many people's efforts aligned and informed without each person having to talk to everyone. It's interface work: moving information around, synchronising effort, and absorbing the friction between people and teams. Here’s some ways it used to show up for me:

And this layer is primarily handled through, you guessed it, AI.

Maybe not today, even Block state they’re in the “early stages of this transition”, and that “it will be a difficult one, and parts of it will likely break before they work”. 

But it is inevitable, let’s use leave approvals as an example.

As a manager, I would have received a leave request from the HRIS, and without much more thought than ‘do we have too many of the team off at one time?’ it would be approved or declined. Only later in my career was capacity planning something we considered, and even then it was messy (and this was in the highest performing team I ever worked with).

Enter AI, where instead, the system could handle this like the resource planning issue it is, and by rapidly evaluating things like:

Just this week I spoke with someone from Zapier who are building a central company brain to do exactly this. Something where every decision, or piece of context to do with a task or project, is captured and accessible across the organisation. (Don’t worry, that amazing interview is coming soon)

So, is the player-coach the role of the future? Half of it will be.

The coordination half I'd hand over tomorrow. I spent years approving leave requests with all the strategic thought of a rubber stamp, and if a company brain can treat them like the resource planning problem they actually are, it should. No argument from me.

The second half is where I run out of answers, because the announcements have plenty to say about where the coordination goes, and much less about developing a team that just got a lot bigger.

Back to the definition, where a player-coach does two things: the craft, and the development of a now-larger team. The companies making these moves have been loud about where the coordination goes, and near silent on how the coaching works once the team gets a lot bigger.

That gap is the problem, because development is the half that doesn't automate. Coaching someone means time with them: watching their work closely enough to give useful feedback, and having the awkward conversations when they're needed. That felt reasonable with a traditional team of 5-8, but I don’t think it scales neatly out to teams of 15 (in Coinbase's case) or 50 (in Meta’s), no matter how much AI you add.

Which leaves a simple test you can run on any of these announcements, or on your own org chart.

If the coordination moved somewhere real (into software, into systems) and leaders got that time back to coach, it's a redesign. I'd back it.

If the layer was deleted and the same people now absorb the coordination and the coaching across more heads, that's the oldest trick in management: two jobs on one salary, with a better title as the consolation prize. This version just ships with an AI press release.

WTF is a player-coach, then? Go back to the sport it borrows from: a coach with a squad of five is coaching, and a coach with a squad of fifty is running drills with a hope and a prayer.

Before you hand out the title, decide which one you're building.

If you enjoyed this post or know someone who may find it useful, please share it with them and encourage them to subscribe.

A roundup of the most interesting stuff from the week:

When you’re ready, here’s three ways I can help you:

1. Tools & resources
Resources and tools that give you what you need to build your own startup compensation practices.

2. Comp consulting
Building startup compensation practices that are clear, fair and competitive.

3. Startup People Summit
A 1-day annual event for People professionals in scaling companies. Creating the playbook for startup people practices. Grab recordings from past events, or subscribe to join the next summit.