Stick with it: making “glue work,” work

Every team has someone quietly holding everything together. They're onboarding new hires, untangling cross-team miscommunications, nudging people to report time, and proactively helping without being asked. Tanya Reilly called this "glue work," and while it's essential, it often falls invisibly on the same people, every time.

In this talk, learn how our organization ran a Tournament of Glue Work (a bracket-style exercise spanning four dimensions of team life) to surface and prioritize the hidden labor keeping us afloat. Come see what bubbled to the top, what surprised us, and how naming glue work changed the way we talk about fairness, recognition, and shared responsibility on engineering teams.