Glue Work

The essential but often invisible coordination, communication, and process work that holds teams together — frequently done by senior or conscientious team members, rarely rewarded at performance review time.

Glue work is a term for the category of work that makes teams function — but that often goes unrecognized in formal performance evaluations because it doesn't produce visible, easily attributable artifacts. It includes activities like onboarding new team members, writing documentation, facilitating meetings to keep projects on track, clarifying requirements between product and engineering, managing cross-team dependencies, following up on blockers, reviewing others' code thoroughly and thoughtfully, synthesizing information from multiple sources into shared understanding, and generally doing the organizational work that keeps a project moving. The name reflects the fact that this work 'glues' the team together — without it, things fall apart; but when done well, it's invisible.

The concept was popularized in engineering and tech communities through a 2019 talk by Tanya Reilly ('Being Glue'), which articulated the pattern: technically skilled employees — often but not exclusively women and underrepresented groups — do large amounts of glue work for their teams, become indispensable to team functioning, and are then penalized at promotion time because their performance reviews lack the kind of discrete technical artifacts (shipped features, implemented systems) that promotion rubrics reward. The team benefits from their glue work; they do not.

This creates a genuine career risk, particularly for conscientious people who are good at noticing what the team needs and stepping in to provide it. If glue work crowds out the technical or functional deliverables that are explicitly valued in promotion rubrics, the employee who does the most glue work may be the least promotable — even if removing them from the team would be catastrophic. The risk is compounded at senior levels: as scope expands, more glue work is expected, but the promotion rubric often still rewards visible individual technical contributions over team-enabling work.

The solution is not to stop doing glue work — teams genuinely need it — but to do it selectively, ensure it's recognized explicitly, and protect time for the visible work that drives promotion. Managers share responsibility here: treating glue work as invisible or unvaluable, or allowing it to accumulate on the same people repeatedly without recognition, is a management failure. At mature organizations, senior IC and manager roles explicitly include team-enabling work in their expectations — which makes the recognition more straightforward. At companies where this isn't the case, employees who do significant glue work benefit from naming it and making it legible in self-reviews and promotion packets.

Examples of Glue Work

  • Writing onboarding documentation that halves the time it takes a new engineer to be productive on the codebase.
  • Tracking down and clearing a cross-team dependency blocker that three people had tried and failed to resolve, enabling the project to ship on time.
  • Facilitating a design review that was stuck in bikeshedding, synthesizing the disagreements, and driving the team to a decision.
  • Maintaining the team's incident runbooks, post-mortem templates, and on-call documentation so incidents are handled faster.
  • Reviewing other engineers' code not just for correctness but for maintainability, style, and test coverage — and doing it promptly enough that it doesn't block others.
  • Synthesizing stakeholder feedback from multiple sources into a clear, prioritized product brief that the engineering team can act on.
  • Noticing that a new team member is confused about the team's processes and proactively mentoring them rather than waiting for them to ask.

How to Make Glue Work Visible

  • Name it explicitly in self-reviews: 'I led the documentation initiative that reduced onboarding time for three new hires' with a measurable outcome is promotable evidence; 'I helped onboard new team members' is not.
  • Track it: keep a running document of your glue contributions throughout the cycle — it's much harder to recall and articulate them retroactively at review time.
  • Tie it to outcomes: connect each glue contribution to a team or business outcome — blocked project unblocked, incident response time reduced, engineer ramp time cut — rather than describing the activity itself.
  • Ask your manager to advocate for it: in calibration discussions, your manager needs to be able to articulate why your cross-team coordination work matters, not just your feature shipping.
  • Get visibility: when you do significant glue work that others benefit from, ensure the people who benefit know you were the one who did it — not for credit, but because invisible contributions can't be rewarded.

The Organizational Responsibility

Organizations that allow glue work to accumulate invisibly on a subset of their employees pay a real cost: those employees become bottlenecks and eventually burn out, churn, or stop doing the glue work that was sustaining team function. The most effective teams distribute glue work explicitly — recognizing it as work with real cost and real value, allocating it deliberately rather than allowing it to accrete to whoever is most willing to do it, and including it explicitly in performance evaluation criteria. Engineering managers who understand this problem can protect their team members from glue work overload and advocate credibly for its recognition in promotion decisions.

Example

A mid-level engineer is told in her annual review that she's not promotable to senior because her technical contributions aren't sufficiently visible. She's frustrated: she spent 30% of the year onboarding two new engineers, maintaining the team's runbooks, triaging bugs, and coordinating with three partner teams on a cross-company integration. None of this appeared prominently in her self-review because she didn't think it counted. Her manager didn't advocate for it because it hadn't been framed as promotable work. The following cycle, she and her manager explicitly document her glue contributions, tie them to measurable outcomes, and successfully make the case in the promotion packet.