37signals has published its internal Manager Playbook. This from a company that generally argues against management as a profession.
This goes back to a couple pattern-shaped ideas in Rework: Everybody Works argued that managers should still make things; Hire Managers of One pushed readers to hire people capable of directing themselves.
As the company grew, it tried something more conventional. Full-time professional managers appeared, including in engineering. Then, in 2024, DHH got rid of them again. Senior practitioners would manage one or two people while continuing to do their own work.
In a 2025 REWORK episode on managing versus mentoring, principal programmer Jeffrey Hardy described senior people mentoring junior ones, coordinating work and conducting performance evaluations without becoming career managers. Later that year, DHH argued that managers still need to understand someone’s work well enough to judge its quality and pace. This is basically what I write about in Distributed Management: management is too important to be trapped in a single role.
In their new handbook, 37signals asks managers to hold 1:1s, inspect work, coach judgment and run performance reviews, which involve looking at actual projects and PRs rather than assembling a broad 360. Managers regularly assess skills, engagement and coachability, document problems and escalate when necessary.
But! Much of the normal manager bundle has been removed. Managers don’t set compensation or approve PTO. Salaries are standardized by role and level. Serious complaints go to People Ops. Status reporting happens asynchronously. Profit sharing is formulaic. If an underperforming employee starts consuming enough managerial attention to interfere with the manager’s actual work, People Ops and senior leadership step in.
That last bit was the weakness in the model. DHH acknowledged as much in 2024: strong employees often require very little management, while a struggling employee can suddenly require a lot of it.
Most companies create managers by accumulation: give someone direct reports and gradually add performance, development, approvals, staffing, compensation, coordination, administration and status collection. Eventually that becomes a full-time job. 37signals has spent years pulling those responsibilities apart, deciding where each should live, and keeping the remaining manager role small enough for a practitioner to do alongside real work.
