Policy Lead Archetypes

Why do we need Policy Leads?

Leading a policy team can sometimes feel like herding cats. Take a group of bright and intellectual people driven by a desire to change the world for the better, and you’ll have as many opinions for how best to go about it as you have people. Inevitably, someone needs to step up, see the big picture, and lead. They’ll get everyone aligned on what work will happen, ensure that it actually happens, and make the organization better for it. In other words, someone needs to provide policy leadership.

Why is there so much confusion about Policy Leads?
The Archetypes
Useful while not Exhaustive
Frequently Asked Questions
Closing Thoughts

When a team is small, policy leadership work is typically borne by the team’s managers, and these duties are often perceived (inaccurately) as “people management” work.

On large policy teams, policy leadership work is more easily recognized as its own form of leadership, separate from people management duties. This is due in no small part to the fact that large policy teams operate at a scale where the duties of people-managing leave little room for policy leadership work (and vice versa). A growing team will inevitably reach a point when the management and coordination overhead (which grows non-linearly as you add people) demands more time than managers can spare if they also do policy leadership work.

The head of a large Policy team who tries to perform all policy leadership duties on their own while simultaneously leading the entire organization will inevitably underperform in one or both aspects or burn out trying. Thus, it’s not unusual to see specific aspects of policy leadership duties delegated to senior team members who demonstrate both an interest and an aptitude for that work. These team members function as Policy Leads.

It’s worth restating that policy leadership does not involve managing people; rather, people with Policy Leadership responsibilities manage the policy work itself. They may have done a stint as a people manager (the best policy leads typically have since people management forces you to get better at communicating with, directing, and mentoring others), but that is not their current focus. Instead, their priority as Policy Leads is to set direction and guide the execution of the team’s work to get things done.

Why is there so much confusion about Policy Leads?

Much of the vagueness around what it means to be a Policy Lead stems from the fact that different companies have different approaches to policy leadership. Some companies subsume policy leadership duties within a people management position. Other companies ask individual contributors to function as Policy Leads without giving them a Policy Lead job title. Yet other companies create a separate Policy Lead position on the organizational chart. Note that these different configurations are all valid organizational choices depending on the size of the team and the current team composition.

Despite these variations in how the work is distributed—or perhaps because of it—it’s instructive to recognize that certain types of policy leadership work are universally needed on any Policy team and thus can be recognized as archetypes.

The Archetypes

This post uses the term ‘archetype’ to refer to a prototypical grouping or classification of Policy Leadership work. Each archetype description focuses on its most crucial aspects to highlight the distinct and important function the archetype performs on a policy team.

The archetypes covered in this post are:

The Policy Area Lead
The Policy Architect
The Policy Integration Lead

Avoid the trap of thinking that each archetype must be a person or a position in the organizational chart (though, in some cases, they are). The archetypes represent duties and responsibilities that may be performed by a person or a small group of people, either as their full-time job or as one of several roles they play.

Note: There are more Policy Lead Archetypes beyond the ones listed above, and I hope to cover more of them as time and reflection permit. For now, I’ve purposely limited myself to the three most common archetypes.

How the Archetypes Work Together

The diagram below depicts the relationships between the three Policy Lead Archetypes:

Each Policy Area Lead sets the direction and guides the execution of work for a policy area. The many Policy Area “slices” collectively make up the “pie” that is the policy portfolio of the team. In the diagram below, the Policy Areas are Integrity, Ads, Safety, Legal Requests, and Product Policy. They’re named here for illustrative purposes.
The Policy Architect ensures that policy work is performed consistently and effectively across multiple Policy Areas; their standards and maturity framework are the “anchor” that pulls all the policy areas into a consistent whole.
The Policy Integration Lead adds structure and consistency to the team’s interactions with partner teams in Product, Engineering, and Operations. They “insulate” Partner teams from the inner workings of the Policy Team so that partners get a consistent experience regardless of which Policy Area they’re working with.

How the Policy Lead Archetypes Work Together

These three archetypes collaborate to lead the work of the policy teams. In the following sections, we explore each archetype using a format that’s purposefully similar to job descriptions (though it’s worth reiterating that archetypes are more commonly roles and only become jobs on large teams). Each archetype description has four sections: 1) About the Archetype, 2) About the Person fulfilling the Archetype, 3) About the Work, and 4) What’s Needed for Success.

A recurring theme in these descriptions is worth calling out upfront: Policy Leads need more than just policy expertise to succeed in their roles. They also need a solid grasp of business context, proficiency in navigating organizational politics, and the ability to influence and manage stakeholder expectations. They must constantly prioritize limited resources, reflect on competing viewpoints, and develop a joint path forward with partner teams. To be effective, Policy Leads must recognize that the policy point of view is just one of the many inputs that are weighed when we make real-world business decisions, and they must operate within that reality.

The Policy Area Lead

Sets the direction and guides the execution of work for a policy area. A policy area is a logical grouping of policies, such as Safety, Creator Monetization, Ads, Government Requests, or Integrity. A Policy team is likely to have several Policy Area Leads. One person may be the Policy Area Lead of one or two related areas.

The Policy Area Lead draws on their prior, deep experience in policy-making to lead the work of an area.

They are T-shaped in their policy knowledge—having deep expertise in one or more major policies (most likely having directly worked on some of them previously) while maintaining the breadth needed to lead the work for all policies in their area.
It is their prior experience in policy-making that makes them effective in breaking work down into chunks and thoughtfully scoping tasks to match the capabilities of team members so the work can be assigned confidently.
Policy Area Leads typically do not work directly on the thorniest policy assignments, choosing instead to delegate the deep thinking work across the team. They adopt this delegation strategy to give team members growth opportunities and give themselves the time and space to do actual leadership work, as described below.

The duties of the Policy Area Lead include the following:

Set the roadmap and plan for their policy area, with near-term projects documented in more detail and with an eye towards improving the maturity of the policy area as a whole.
Continuously evaluate the effectiveness of the policies in their area to confirm that they are achieving their stated purposes and are not incentivizing or enabling undesired outcomes and behaviors.
Scope and break down complex policy projects so the work can be assigned and tracked in manageable chunks. Review and sign off on all work products within their area.
Partner with the people managers on the team (who have the final say on assignments) to ensure that work is distributed in ways that challenge and develop individual team members.
Participate in annual, quarterly, and monthly cross-functional planning and sync meetings with partner teams, and work with their counterparts on these teams to operationalize policy changes.
Maintain the backlog of requested improvements for their policy area, updating the overall roadmap and plan as needed.
Provide prioritization guidance to resolve staffing or resource contention issues that block progress within their policy area.
Periodically review summaries of the latest research, trends, and regulatory obligations that affect their policy area and update roadmaps and plans accordingly. (A team member typically does the actual deep research.)
Provide policy guidance and input during crises and incidents, proactively keeping other Policy Area Leads in the loop when issues spiral beyond their area.
Review proposed exceptions to existing policies and ensure that all relevant stakeholders are notified before any exceptions are granted. Ensure that any exceptions are documented with full justification and approvals so these cases can be used as inputs to policy improvements.
Elevate the skills and proficiency of team members and strengthen the team by training, mentoring, and being a good role model.

To succeed in this role, a Policy Area Lead needs to be aware of the business context in which their team operates, maintaining the cross-functional relationships that are integral to their area’s success. They don’t have the luxury of retreating to an ivory tower where policy concerns reign supreme. Instead, they weigh policy ideals against business priorities and negotiate with Product, Engineering, and Operations teams to work through implementation tradeoffs. They ensure that team members understand how their work fits into the plans of cross-functional teams and overall company priorities. And they do all this while actively building a psychologically safe team culture.

The Policy Architect

Ensures that policy work is performed consistently and effectively across multiple Policy Areas. They routinely review the entire “codex” of policies maintained by the Policy team, highlight any gaps, and ensure that existing policies make sense as a cohesive whole.

The Policy Architect is seen as a valued thought partner by Policy Area Leads.

They most likely came up through the ranks as a senior domain specialist in one of the Policy Areas and are intimately familiar with all stages of the policy-making process. They use this firsthand knowledge of policy work and combine it with an affinity for thinking in frameworks, methodologies, and patterns to create an integrated set of templates and checklists for the team.
They’re excellent Scribes (as defined in Policy Personas). Because of the standards and templates created by the Policy Architect, two separate policies written by two different Policy Areas will look like a single team wrote them.

The duties of the Policy Architect include the following:

Define and improve the team’s Policy Maturity Model—specifying what goes into the making of a “complete” policy and providing a framework for measuring its maturity—and maintain the team’s overall Policy Maturity Scorecard.
Create and maintain team-wide templates and checklists for all policy deliverables and train team members on their usage. Provide a Style Guide for the Policy team’s external-facing deliverables where needed.
Proactively identify any overlaps between Policy Areas and serve as an impartial third party in discussions to clarify areas of shared ownership and accountability.
Lead the team’s perennial Policy Audit efforts to assess the maturity of each policy area and provide recommendations for improvement.
Chair the recurring sync meetings of the Policy Area Leads, acting as the first among equals.
Recommend stakeholder checkpoints, both internal (Legal, Privacy, etc.) and external (public comment periods, local experts, researchers, etc.) for inclusion in the policy-making process.
Keep up with industry best practices (e.g., the DTSP Best Practices Framework or the Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation) and update the team’s Policy Maturity Model and templates as needed. Contribute best practices back to the industry.

To succeed in this role, a Policy Architect must see themselves as an enabler rather than a judge, gatekeeper, or auditor, even if their duties include leading the team’s ongoing policy audits. They offer practical recommendations, recognizing that standards and methodologies are a means to an end and that onerous standards and templates will fall into disuse. They perform a continuous and necessary coordination function, ensuring that Policy Areas work the same way, learn from one another, and don’t run in different directions. They work in service of the Policy Areas and adapt their frameworks and recommendations accordingly.

The Policy Integration Lead

Serves as the bridge between the Policy Areas and their partner teams, such as Product, Engineering, and Operations. The Policy Integration Lead is deeply knowledgeable about what partner teams need to scale and operationalize new and updated policies. They work with Policy Area Leads to meet these needs while remaining a staunch advocate for the Policy team, ensuring that Policy concerns are communicated.

The Policy Integration Lead is seen as the linchpin that allows multiple Policy Areas to communicate with partner teams in one voice. They have a deep understanding of how policies are operationalized and may have climbed the ranks on the Operations side before taking on Policy Integration duties. Leaders on partner teams who talk to one Policy Area know they can expect similar interactions and deliverables from other Policy Areas because of the standards and processes that the Policy Integration Lead has implemented.

The duties of the Policy Integration Lead include the following:

Create and refine the working agreements between the Policy team and their partner teams so that team-level expectations, responsibilities, and dependencies are documented and understood by all parties.
Codify these team-level working agreements through shared/cross-team processes, templates, and guides that Policy Areas use to communicate with partner teams for cross-functional planning and status syncs.
Serve as the primary point of contact for partner teams during cross-functional planning and regular business reviews or recurring syncs, bringing in Policy Area Leads for deep-dive conversations as needed.
Work with Policy Area Leads to maintain an integrated and prioritized view of the team’s policy operationalization plans across multiple policy areas. In cases where two or more Policy Areas are in competition for the same limited resources on a partner team, the Policy Integration Lead ensures that these competing needs are assessed and ranked team-wide, with the necessary approvals and sign-offs.
Ensure that any newly urgent, unavoidable, and/or previously unscheduled work (usually due to top-down directives or external factors) is added to the overall team roadmap and that this new work is reflected in the roadmaps of each Policy Area by their respective Leads. Ensure that the inevitable impact on existing schedules and work assignments is identified and communicated to affected parties.
Maintain strong relationships with all key stakeholders. Stay on top of emerging issues and resolve blockers on policy operationalization projects to keep planned policy launches on track with minimal inter-team drama and burnout. Where needed, use the learning from these issues to update the team’s policy integration templates and processes to address the underlying cause of these issues systemically.
Partner with cross-functional teams so that the Policy team’s insights, recommendations, and constraints are reflected in their team strategies. Stay connected and updated on the plans of Partner teams so that any launches or initiatives (e.g., launching in a new country, launching a new product category) that give rise to new/unsupported policy areas are identified early, and partner teams benefit from the Policy team’s input.

To succeed in this role, the person(s) fulfilling the Policy Integration Leadership duties must be seen as a valued and sought-after collaborator by partner teams. They contribute to the crafting of team strategy and objectives in light of their scope and oversight. They must be steeped in multiple Policy Personas: the Diplomat, the Operator, the Communicator, and the Doer. They are focused on the company’s overall priorities first and the Policy team’s objectives second.

On large policy teams, it is not unusual for Policy Integration Leadership duties to be handled by the VP/head of the policy team (for high-level direction, prioritization, and stakeholder alignment) with a trusted right hand or Chief of Staff who is adept at the Operator and Doer personas, and/or a strong program manager. It is very rare indeed to find someone who can fulfill the policy integration leadership duties singlehandedly on behalf of a large policy team.

Useful while not Exhaustive

While this post attempts to identify and define a set of Policy Lead Archetypes, it does not claim to be complete.

Despite not being exhaustive, however, these archetypes are useful if one or more of these situations applies to you:

You’re a senior individual contributor looking for career growth outside of the management track. If you are a Policy professional at the Senior job level and aspire to have a more impactful leadership role on the team, one or more of these Policy Archetypes may resonate with you. If the policy leadership role you seek does not yet exist or is not recognized on your team, use the Archetype description(s) to start a conversation with your manager.
You lead a small to mid-sized policy team and could use a reference for deciding how to distribute policy leadership duties. The archetypes provide a framework for thinking through related policy leadership duties and can help you determine how best to distribute the work to managers and senior individual contributors alike.
You’re writing or expanding job descriptions to formalize policy leadership duties. Whether you’re looking to create an actual Policy Lead position in the organizational chart or simply expanding the remit of an existing position, the archetypes serve as a checklist of the many duties that need to be performed to keep a policy team effective. You can get a head start on this work by mapping the Policy Archetype duties to the positions on your team. Bear in mind that any unmapped policy leadership duties, by default, become the responsibility of the head of the team.
You want to add Staff-plus job levels to your team’s Individual Contributor career ladder¹ and are looking for a way to jump-start that work. If your large policy team does not yet have Staff-plus job levels (i.e., Staff level and higher) for the individual contributor career ladder, you can use the Policy Lead Archetypes to help your HR Business Partner or People Team understand that Policy Leads perform a higher order of policy leadership work beyond the typical job levels (Junior, Associate, Mid-Level, and Senior). While most team members can aspire to reach the Senior job level, only a few have the necessary combination of policy personas and experience to make it into the Staff-plus levels in a large policy team. The archetypes help make this distinction clear.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What’s the difference between a People Manager and a Policy Lead?

People management duties that are outside the realm of Policy Leadership include:

Staffing the team, including hiring for new or open roles and ensuring that the team continues to operate effectively during planned and unplanned staffing shortages (e.g., vacations, parental leaves, sabbaticals, etc.).
Budgeting and headcount planning in partnership with Finance and often in collaboration with partner teams so that the staffing of cross-functional initiatives happens in sync.
Ongoing compensation reviews for team members in partnership with HR or the People team.
Developing team members, including conducting performance reviews (with input from the Policy Leads), working with individual team members on their development plans and career paths, and promoting team members as appropriate.
Keeping their team engaged through timely team communications, regular 1:1s, and other actions that recognize and reward desired performance and behaviors.

Executive-level people managers have additional duties that befit their authority and accountability, including but not limited to:

Setting the team’s strategy, charter, and vision so team members understand the team’s boundaries, see how the team’s work fits within the company in general and with partner teams in particular, know how to set priorities (including what work to drop), and have a set of guiding principles for making these decisions.
Defining the team’s organizational strategy, which includes defining and improving the team’s career ladder and pay scales, deciding on an organizational approach (functional, regional, matrixed, etc.), maintaining a cohesive set of job descriptions, and staying aligned with organization-wide job levels.
Improving the organization’s efficiency, which requires tracking and monitoring team-level key performance indicators (KPIs) and progress against Objectives and Key Results (OKRs).
Providing timely feedback to the team’s leaders, both people managers and policy leads alike.

Being a people manager entails more than the aforementioned responsibilities, but the items listed should provide sufficient contrast between Policy Leadership and People Management work. (This distinction is hopefully useful even if you have individuals who, by necessity, are performing both duties.)

2. When does a team need a Policy Lead position on the org chart?

While one need not have a Policy Lead position on the org chart to function as a Policy Lead, companies that create policy lead positions typically do so when the policy leadership work is complex enough to require an individual’s sustained and full-time focus.

Other indicators that creating a Policy Lead position may be appropriate include one or more of the following conditions:

The team has grown past 100 people and is organized into distinct policy areas, with individual team members choosing to specialize in one area;
Your partner teams are demanding a primary point of contact for cross-functional planning (right now, they’re having to talk to multiple team members who don’t provide consistent answers);
The team is now operating in multiple time zones and regions/locations and relies on locally-based managers to handle people management duties; or
Partner teams within the company have grown in size and complexity, so the work to stay in sync with partner teams has likewise increased in scope and difficulty.

3. How do you decide what goes into a Policy Area?

Ultimately, the choice of how to scope policy areas depends on what aligns with your company’s priorities, the current state of your policies, and the people you have on your team.

In general, you’ll be trying to balance two competing desires:

Keep each Policy Area small enough that the Policy Area Lead and the Policy Area Manager(s) they partner with are challenged by their roles but not overwhelmed by them.
Keep the number of Policy Areas as low as possible to keep the cross-team coordination overhead manageable.

In practice, this means you will be weighing several factors, including:

The maturity of the policy area. The less mature a policy area is, the more time and attention it will likely require from its Policy Area Lead.
The experience of the policy area leads and policy area managers. Experienced leads and managers are better equipped to handle large policy areas than a first-time lead.
The number of people you have who can lead. The burden of leadership takes a toll, and not everyone who is capable will be interested (and vice versa).
The number of people who specialize in that area. The more people who work within a policy area, the more time and effort it will take to lead it.

Plan on regularly revisiting the way Policy Areas are scoped as the team evolves in size and composition and new policy needs arise. If your leads and managers struggle to keep up with their duties and reducing their load is not an option, you may need to consider using the next open position to hire someone suitable. Getting the right people into the right roles is akin to aiming for a moving target. Expect to make adjustments over time.

4. How senior must someone be to take on Policy Lead duties?

The short answer is: it depends.

On a small policy team with one head who directly manages all team members, specific aspects of Policy Leadership work can be distributed as the head of the team sees fit. The exact distribution of work will depend on the needs of the team and the interests/skillsets of the current team members. The policy leadership tasks may also be assigned on a rotation basis so that all team members get a taste of each archetype and come out of the rotations more well-rounded.

On a team that has opted to create Policy Lead positions on the organizational chart, the prerequisites for the job are far more stringent. To fully handle the obligations of an archetype in a large policy team, one must have an intersection of skills, behaviors, and experiences that can only reasonably be expected from Staff-plus job levels. This includes a solid grasp of business strategy and context, policy subject matter expertise, proficiency in navigating organizational politics and managing stakeholder expectations, and process thinking. Policy Leads working at this scale must deal with the reality of prioritizing limited resources and contending with competing perspectives from non-policy stakeholders.

While it’s true that people below the Staff level, such as senior individual contributors, can reasonably take on one or more specific aspects of policy leadership in a large policy team (e.g., reviewing policy deliverables, proposing new templates, contributing to roadmaps, etc.), they do so with the borrowed authority of a senior leader who performs the final review and grants approval. Below the Staff level, most individual contributors have not yet earned the right to speak on behalf of the team and do not have the authority to commit the team’s resources to initiatives. Instead, they are typically assigned specific subsets of Policy Leadership duties as development opportunities.

5. Can the Policy Architect work be handled by the Policy Area Lead for their area?

When no one is designated as the Policy Architect, the Policy Area Lead, by default, will step up to serve as the policy architect for their area. However, this is, at best, a short-term fallback with its own unpleasant side-effects.

Even if policy work is self-consistent within a Policy Area, it will almost certainly not be consistent when viewed from a team-wide lens. Each Policy Area Lead will want to optimize their approach for their area. They will have their own definition of what a “complete” and “mature” policy looks like. They’ll run their policy audits differently. Each Policy Area Lead will also be reluctant to impose their own standards on other policy areas, which means the sharing of practices will be done ad hoc, driven more by personal relationships than by an organizational process. What’s more, any areas of overlap between policy areas are likely to go unnoticed and lead to duplication of work or, worse, devolve into bitter turf battles.

When there is no designated Policy Architect, the burden of ensuring consistency across policy areas falls “up” to the head of the team. Several possible outcomes follow, none of them desirable:

The head of the team will do this work properly, but it will consume a lot of their time. They will effectively have been “pulled into the weeds” and forced to drop other duties that only the head of the team can do;
The head of the team will attempt to delegate the work to several managers but is unlikely to follow through to ensure it happens. Managers will most likely not prioritize this standardization effort because it falls into the “important but not urgent” category; or
The head of the team will perform this leadership task only opportunistically or halfheartedly (e.g., they may take an exceptionally well-written deliverable from one policy area and share it with other areas as a “guide”).

In the long run, a Policy team with no functioning Policy Architect will end up with an inconsistent mishmash of policy practices that is confusing for partner teams and other corporate functions (Communications, Legal, Government Affairs, etc.) who work with more than one policy area.

6. If you have a Policy Integration Lead, do the Policy Area Leads still meet with partner teams?

Yes! The Policy Integration Lead interacts primarily with senior leaders on partner teams for cross-functional planning, prioritization, and project tracking purposes. The Policy Integration Lead stays focused on keeping the policy team aligned with all partner teams at the “big picture” level. They’re not expected to know or drive the day-to-day, nitty-gritty details of policy work for each policy area.

Policy Area Leads and team members continue to deal directly with their counterparts on partner teams to implement previously approved policy operationalization projects. The Policy Integration lead only gets involved when an approved project goes off-track and impacts the big-picture, cross-functional roadmap.

Closing Thoughts

By understanding the distinct roles of Policy Leads and the value of their work, we can reduce confusion and maximize the effectiveness of these important roles.

The best way to think about Policy Lead Archetypes is to view each archetype as a set of leadership duties that need to be performed for a policy team to be effective. These archetypes focus on leading and organizing the work of the policy team rather than on hiring, managing, and developing the people who do the work.

You’ll want to avoid the trap of thinking that each archetype must be a person or a position in the organizational chart (though, in some cases, they are). The archetypes represent duties and responsibilities that may be performed by a person or a small group of people, either as their full-time job or as one of several roles they play.

The exact organizational configuration you adopt is secondary to ensuring that the policy leadership work is recognized, delegated, and performed well.

Footnotes

You’ll typically know it’s time to consider adding Staff-plus levels when your partner teams start defining Staff-plus roles themselves. For example, engineering teams have Staff-plus Engineers, product teams have Staff Product Managers, and Operations teams have Staff Product Operations Managers. ↩︎

Related posts

_{Author’s note: This post draws much inspiration from Will Larson’s seminal book and site, Staff Engineer, Charity Majors’ fiery piece on The Engineer/Manager Pendulum, and Tanya Reilly’s The Staff Engineer’s Path. Their writings were useful guideposts for thinking about expertise-based leadership and have helped clarify my thinking on this subject.}

_{I’m grateful to LM for nudging me in the right direction with the Policy Integration Lead. I also appreciate how LM and CW have been brilliant thought partners on the difference between functional leadership and people management through the years. Many thanks go to BC, DH, SM, YR, and MVW for reviewing and commenting on my earlier drafts. This post has more nuance and clarity because of their feedback.}