Your Seams Are Exposed
Leadership + Management Insights
By: Brandy Brown
Custom CSS
Add your custom CSS code below
Some people can't not see the ecosystem.
Every project, every system, every team interaction — they're already tracing how it connects to everything around it.
But organizations don't hire for that. They hire for lanes.
So these people pick one. Not because it's how they see the work, but because it's the onramp to the highway.
Most people operate within their lane.
That's how roles are defined.
That's how work is measured.
But some people don't experience the work that way.
They don't see a ticket, a feature, or a scoped problem.
They see an ecosystem and how it all connects.
They follow where things break.
They trace issues across boundaries.
They move between parts of the system without really thinking about it.
Not because they're trying to step outside their lane, but because the work doesn't stay in one lane.
It's worth asking whether these people are rare.
But that question is harder to answer than it seems. Because we've contained system-wide responsibility and accountability in the management lane.
But managing people isn't the same as systems-level IC work. They're different skills, different work, different wiring entirely.
Sometimes they end up in roles that look like a fit — manager-ICs, hybrid positions, "lead" titles that suggest both.
For a while, the systems work happens.
But management pulls. It always pulls harder.
The IC work doesn't disappear because they stopped seeing it.
It disappears because
there's no time for it,
no mandate for it,
no way to measure it.
So eventually, it just stops.
They're still in the system.
But the work that made them valuable quietly went with it.
The fact that this work gets buried in hybrid titles, tacked onto other roles, or quietly dropped when the designated lane's metric comes calling is not an accident.
It's simply a reflection of how much the company, and the industry more broadly, values this work.
Which is:
Not enough to give it a name.
Not enough to measure it.
Not enough to build a lane for it.
Your best systems thinkers aren't missing.
They may not even be rare.
They're just stuffed back into lanes the system knows how to appreciate.
And the work that only they could see — the gaps, the risks, the compounding friction nobody named — is still there.
Waiting.
Creating space for these people isn't a matter of goodwill or flexibility.
It requires something harder.
Because the problem isn't just that there's no role for them.
It's that there's no metric for them.
Their work doesn't roll up cleanly to any one lane. It crosses silos. It improves systems that multiple teams own. It prevents failures that never get attributed to anything.
But the results are undeniable.
Even so, the program that didn't collapse, the integration that actually worked, the team that stopped working against itself — the credit disperses.
Formal space means formal measurement.
It means deciding that cross-lane impact is worth capturing,
worth attributing,
worth rewarding,
worth hiring for.
That's not a small ask.
But without it, your users are left to make it work. Fighting with the seams left exposed, driven mad with workarounds and stalled progress.
Because the people who would have caught it — who were already seeing it — got pushed back into a lane.
Or out entirely.
