# Team leads vs managers — and why leads aren't paid more

- **Episode:** [189](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/189.md) (2025-04-17)
- **Type:** interview
- **Tags:** team-leads, managers, compensation, leadership
- **Time:** 26:15–33:00 (start 1575s)
- **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/189?t=1575](https://truthliesandwork.com/189?t=1575)

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[26:15] Al Elliott: You've mentioned 2 words there. You said team lead and you said manager. Are these the same people?
[26:22] James Hawkins: Yeah, pretty much now they are. And to start off with, it wasn't really the case, but yeah. So the normal structure would be, say a team is 4 people. One of them is the team lead. That person is also made the line manager of the other 3 people in the team. So that's kind of one level of management. We have an exec team that's tiny. So there are 4 people in the exec team at the moment. And the exec team, one of the execs is responsible for, every small team will go up to one of the execs, basically. Um, in practice, how that actually looks and feels is my co-founder and I are project-based. Like, we'll, um, we try to have almost no direct reports at any time. And then we have 2 other execs who just make sure the company runs smoothly. One is go-to-market, ops, and finance oriented. The other one is, she's engineering oriented. So she has like 7 or 8 teams reporting to her. Charles has a whole bunch of other teams reporting to him and go-to-market, and then Tim and I will hop into teams. For example, I've just spent a couple of days with one of our small teams working on all our AI stuff that we want to build through this year, because there's a lot changing. The week or two before, I joined one of our other small teams to work on a rebrand of our website on an individual kind of level. And my co-founder's kind of similar, and he specializes more in new products. And I tend to specialize more in things that are a little bit more design or brand oriented in general
[27:47] Al Elliott: So we've got a team of 4 people
[27:50] James Hawkins: Yep
[27:51] Al Elliott: Um, you did, am I got this right? You have decided that those 4 people are together and you have decided that person A is going to be the team lead. Is that the right way?
[27:59] James Hawkins: Uh, yes
[28:00] midroll (Phil Agnew, Nudge): Yeah
[28:00] Al Elliott: What happens when you join that team? Do you work for then the team lead?
[28:04] James Hawkins: Uh, it's pretty informal if I'm honest. I think we, um, Sometimes I'll say, hey, we have this AI team at the moment. I'll be like, hey, Michael, who runs the team lead, I'm proposing that I'm your boss for the next few weeks. And then I'll hand you back to Raquel, probably at the end, who manages the team so it's in a bit more of a steady state. So I will temporarily become the boss of the small team. I'm just going to probably turn up to a bunch of standups or go to an offsite or something. And I'll cherry-pick this team. is in a more existential mode where we're trying to figure out what the overall strategy is or something, or we're building something unusual or doesn't fit with how we normally would work, or it's something kind of a little bit different, or it's a zero-to-one kind of problem. Whereas once the team's in like a state where we have like thousands of customers and stuff, I'm just not as good at looking after it, I've found. So yeah, but we'll swap, like I will swap who I'm managing quite frequently too. Again, you're not supposed to swap managers all the time. But we have had no, we've just had no issues with it. You end up with like a couple of you actually have quite close relationships with the team leads anyway. And because I think normally that's problematic because you have like, oh, one manager's pulling me in this direction, the next manager's pulling me in a different direction. But I think the reality is like, we're not that heavily influencing what actually gets worked on most of the time with these teams. So I don't think the manager, like kind of no one cares almost is how it feels because We're not really influencing, like in the short run I am, like I'm spending like a week on this particular team to influence the direction quite heavily. But then we'll just leave them alone for like, it could be 6 months or a year or whatever, where they're gonna, like, I'll still talk to them, but like, I'm not gonna be up in their grill around what they're working on. So the management component of how important your manager feels, I think is really reduced. We also don't do one-on-ones, for example. There's like lots of other stuff we've removed. Um, to say, yeah, there's a couple of things here that look very different to what you're supposed to do
[30:07] Al Elliott: Did you say that the team lead gets paid the same as everyone else in the team?
[30:11] James Hawkins: Yeah. Um, sometimes less, depending if they're, if they're like less experienced as an engineer, for example
[30:16] Al Elliott: So if I was Raquel and you were like, okay, cool, Raquel, you're leading this team of 4 people and you're going to go and do this cool thing. I'd be like, yeah, but I feel like I'm getting more work and I'm not getting any extra money. Does that happen?
[30:29] James Hawkins: Yeah, I think so. Sometimes people will say no for that reason. And I'm like, great, this is actually quite good. Like if someone, there's like multiple reasons why we will just force it to be this way. One is that we want to be able to swap teams around a lot. And so if it starts affecting people's pay, making changes, your org's not very flexible. And we are kind of like a hypergrowth sort of company. And thus we are changing our structure over and over again. It's been like having like In sales, we took forever to give people commission. Like we really, really delayed having any kind of commission structure because we're like, well, so much is going to be in flux. If each change we make can affect people, will affect people's pay, we're not going to be able to change easily or quickly and it's going to be really hard. So we're pushing flexibility really matters. It's partly for that kind of reason. But yeah, it does. Some people will just want to do it though. Like they'll want to, you know, a lot of engineers will pick it up going, hey, I would like to see what it's like. Like we have loads of engineers, for example, who they might be curious about what's it like actually managing a couple other people. And then what happens in 6 months is they tell you that they hate it and they want to swap back. One of the ways to not get hired at PostHog is to say, I want to manage loads of people, for example. We'll hire people that are just very passionate about building stuff in general. And that's kind of what motivates them. It's not really money. It's not Kind of empire building, because I think this corresponds with the— oh, this correlates with engineers who will want to keep building even when stuff's harder because they just love the underlying work. And some of them are a little bit curious. So I think it's almost like a development point for some people. We might wind up saying, hey, you're getting kind of effectively more senior, like because you've been leading the team that's influencing this now, but it won't guarantee any kind of correlation kind of thing. So, um, I think people often can end up as stronger individual engineers if they have managed a few people, because they kind of get the, they might have a slightly broader picture of the business, for example, they have a slightly better understanding of what the company cares about, which is kind of nuanced. Or I think people who've been managers are easier to, they require less work to manage, I think often as well, because they can empathize with what it's like when you have to deal with a bunch of people. Um, so yeah, there's like some interesting stuff, but yeah, we absolutely will get pushback and we've had people refuse before, um, to do this. Then we've also had managers swap with one of their direct reports and the manager has proposed it going, hey, I think Joe Bloggs, who reports to me, Mary, should actually be my boss and I should report to them. I think both of us would be happier. And then we'll just pay, and then often we'll just end up making that change