Glue, Grease, and Gas
A mechanism for framing staff+ work
Back from holiday and excited to talk about a framing I like to use to think about staff engineering work. These frames provide a way to organize your work and highlight areas that you may not be pursuing or are underinvested in.
Effective staff+ technical professionals balance investments across how to bring work together, speed things up, and apply immense focused pressure to deliver results.
We’ll look at this through three lenses: glue, grease, and gas.
Glue
Glue work isn’t glamorous, but it makes everyone better. It’s the quiet alignment work, such as merging duplicate efforts, clarifying ownership, fixing a slow build step, or writing the missing doc that unblocks others.
Ways to Apply It
Run gap analyses to surface duplicate tools or infrastructure.
Lead discovery projects (e.g., who’s running their own CI pipelines and why?).
Pay down tech debt that creates recurring friction.
Refactor or document systems or pipelines that others rely on.
Signals of Success
Duplicate efforts happen less, and when they do, it’s intentional.
Ownership becomes clearer.
People stop getting blocked on the same problem twice.
Grease
Grease removes drag. It’s the work that creates flow such as automating reviews, simplifying decision paths, collapsing meetings into async updates, or picking a default so we don’t stall waiting for consensus. When done well, your teammates feel faster, and work is usually more fun.
Ways to Apply It
Define technical strategies or principles that accelerate work.
Improve or remove slow processes.
Make clear technical decisions that unblock progress.
Teach others how to apply the same patterns.
Signals of Success
Fewer status meetings and pretty painless handoffs.
Faster onboarding and delivery cycles.
Teams describe the work as “just easier” or “less risky.”
Gas
Gas is full-throttle execution, diving deep to drive a quick, visible result. Think tiger teams, hackathons, or hands-on sprints where your expertise is the accelerant. You’re called in when the project is too important to fail or needed yesterday.
Ways to Apply It
Create focused programs (v-teams, sprints, hack weeks).
Match skills to problems deliberately, pick the right crew for the way you are structuring the work.
Protect focus by ensuring everyone is 100% funded with zero distractions.
Ensure end-to-end ownership so work doesn’t get blocked.
Signals of Success
High-quality tangible results quickly.
Momentum restored to stalled or critical projects.
Leadership asks, “Can we do that again?”
The framing is useful, but how much
Every staff engineer should have some investment in each bucket, but the right mix depends on what the company needs most.
Slow company? Apply Grease.
Too many duplicate efforts? Apply Glue.
Unaddressed tech debt slowing progress? Apply Glue.
High-stakes goal (e.g., “save $10M in engineering costs by next quarter”)? Apply Gas.
Band Practice - Fix Your Instruments
Pick one recurring process or technical step that slows you down at least once a month. Ask: could it be simplified, automated, or removed? How would that help the team? Then try it out, and report back to me on how it went.
Do it with a teammate. Band practice is better with friends!
S.B.