Bridge roles need to die

Hello. I've been quiet for a while. Two kids and a full time job will do that. But one theme kept surfacing last year that I couldn't shake and I’ve been wanting to write it down for a while.

Bridge roles need to die. Not because the problem(s) they solve don’t matter. Coordination, alignment and cross functional working matter more than ever - but because these roles have become the sticking plaster we reach for instead of doing the harder work: restructuring teams, aligning incentives, building shared goals.

A significant number of the people I coach are in what what we commonly called bridge roles. The jobs that sit between editorial and product; marketing and data, translating jargon, managing friction, trying to make goals shared.

What really struck me over the last year wasn't that these remain challenging roles to navigate (they always has been). It was how much emotional weight these people are having to carry, often invisibly. Still. 15 years or so on from when the roles first started appearing. 

The nature of these roles means the people in them see and experience the dysfunction more clearly than anyone. They hold things together through a mix of sheer force of will for things to be better and putting in serious hours to try and make sure they are. Precisely because they tend to be so effective, the business doesn’t have to confront the underlying issues. 

We keep creating jobs that exist to stand in the gap between editorial and product, and then we wonder why the gap never closes.

The important question then becomes: how do we build better infrastructure? Bridge-type roles might be part of a transition, but they should be time-limited secondments with off-boarding plans. We should actively plan how to retire such roles while we're creating them.

That requires a different mindset. Moving from reactive problem-solving to more intentional design. What we really need are town planners for organisations: people thinking about how teams connect, what makes creates a better product for customers what structures need to exist to lower coordination costs. Not another bridge, but proper foundations.

Community

Just before Christmas Joanna Geary got together a fantastic group of speakers to share the interesting projects they are working on and at the same time she hit upon a big problem - the hacks/hackers, open source, rising tide lifts all boats attitude of the 2010’s has faded away. I was sad to miss it.

Fewer orgs blog about their successes and failures, fewer news orgs are open sourcing code to let others build upon their work, fewer people are building in public, fewer groups of people are getting together to learn and share in more informal settings

As ever - i’d love to hear from you, whether you have a different take, agree wholeheartedly - or can point me at examples where people and orgs are solving problems and more.

Mentoring

If you are looking for support and development, I have space for new sessions