Glue Work in Software Product Design and Development
You know how things work, understand customers better than most people on the team, see where the product is headed, and you are called in to calm the never-ending designer-developer feud over how things should be.
Well, you might just be “The Glue.”
Glue Work is the connective tissue of product development, that invisible work of filling gaps that no one else wants to touch. While high-level strategy and feature engineering get the accolades, glue work is often where the real battle for a product’s success is won or lost.
This is the Way
Being glue means handling the tasks that don’t get rewarded or praised during appraisals. They are:
- Documentation. Writing the specs that ensure the engineers and designers are actually building the same thing.
- Communication. Mediating between a technical limitation and a business requirement.
- Onboarding. Helping a new hire understand the messy history of a legacy codebase so they can be productive.
- Process Improvement. Fixing the broken feedback loop that has been slowing the team down for months.
Unforgiven
The paradox of being glue is that when you do it well, you are invisible. If the project runs smoothly, people assume it was just a “good project.” However, if you stop doing the glue work, the project’s velocity stalls, bugs increase, and morale dips.
It is often unrewarding because traditional performance metrics such as tickets closed, lines of code written, or designs delivered rarely capture the value of “making everyone else 20% more effective.” In many organizations, being the person who “just makes things work” can lead to being passed over for promotions in favor of those who shipped visible features.
The Lives of Others
In a world obsessed with “10x Engineers” and “Visionary Designers,” being “The Glue” is decidedly unsexy. It involves more listening than talking and more organizing than creating. It requires high emotional intelligence and a willingness to put the team‘s output above personal ego.
Without someone willing to be the glue, projects suffer from functional silos. You end up with a technically perfect feature that solves the wrong problem, or a beautiful design that is impossible to build.