How People Work, Live! -- the live show about how to people, based on the How People Work workshop that helps teams deliver better, faster.
Join Dan, a very special guest, and any number of interesting people for a free, candid, ad-hoc series of gatherings on Zoom where we find out how to get hard results by learning and applying soft skills. You know, the ones that help you with relationships, influence, communicating with people, and strategy. Easy stuff.
Why? Because success isn't just about what you do and whether you're good at it. It's also about how well you work with others. And like it or not, we all work with other people.
Dan chats with Bluesky devrel lead Jim Ray about relationships and trust in developer relations. Which makes sense, because the word "relations" is in there. There's a whole bit where we talk about and tie back the role of empathy in understanding peoples' different needs, goals, and incentives, and how to get good at the role you've got to be an expert at creating useful clarity. And THEN we have a whole conversation about what's happening with AI coding agents and the role of human-to-human relationships there. Which is to say that it's an important one!
Jim Ray has spent a career being a web developer person inside of media organizations like the Chicago Tribune, msnbc.com, and NBC News before transitioning to being a media-minded person at a few design and tech companies. At Slack he discovered he could finally eradicate that bicameral situation with a job on the Developer Relations team, and after a bit too much time of that, became a founding member of the DevRel team at Bluesky. He lives with his family in the southern Appalachians, wishing he made more time to cook and read.
2 Oct 2026
How People Work, Live! ... with Hillary Hartley
Dan chats with Hillary Hartley about horizontal leadership in government: users, outcomes, trust, and working in the open. Hillary gets to explain horizontal leadership, and how you need to rely on persuasion, coalition-building, the concept of doing reconnaissance, so that you can move decisions closer to the people doing the work. Also a bonus conversations on how to effectively use LLMs by providing specific context to preserve (and increase!) your agency.
Hillary Hartley has spent nearly three decades helping government be simpler, faster, and better for the people who rely on it. She started out working with 30 state governments at NIC Inc., then went inside as a Presidential Innovation Fellow and co-founder of 18F, the first digital services team in the U.S. government. She later became Ontario's first Chief Digital and Data Officer, where she built the Ontario Digital Service and wrote the Simpler, Faster, Better Services Act. She was also CEO of U.S. Digital Response, a nonpartisan nonprofit helping state and local governments strengthen their tech capacity. She founded OpenPublic to coach public sector leaders and make transformation stick, and she co-chairs the FWD50 conference. She lives in Toronto with her family, their dog, and a veritable zoo of stuffed animals.
25 Sept 2026
How People Work, Live! ... with Michele Tepper
Dan chats with Michele who has Strong Opinions about how designers work (and could work better) with other people. What're those Strong Opinions? How about the failure to apply user-centered design and systems thinking to how your organization works. Oh, and how critical it is to build trust right from the bvery beginning, a brief detour into the early days of Archive of Our Own, and then capping it off with Salesforce's V2MOM prioritization system (Dan becomes a big fan!) and One Great Tip to deal with people bringing AI prototypes to a knife fight.
Michele (Misha) Tepper is a design leader who's spent 20+ years figuring out how to make complex software feel simple — from co-founding the Archive of Our Own (https://archiveofourown.org/) (now with 8 million users and a Hugo Award) to designing mortgage data visualization tools at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She's built and shipped products with teams of every size, at scrappy startups and Fortune 500s alike, and has strong opinions about what actually makes cross-functional collaboration work. She recently ended a 7-year stint at Salesforce, leading design for developer tools at Heroku and the Salesforce Platform. She lives in Brooklyn, NY, with her extroverted dog Indy.
18 Sept 2026
How People Work, Live! ... with Anna Pickard
Dan and Anna have a catchup and absolutely do not talk about cats with thumbs or omniscient butter gods. What they do talk about is how Anna develops voice and tone guidelines with writing teams and what that means for selling work internally. They talk about three Cs of Context, Content, and Conversation (which they'll come back to a lot), code switching, making sure you have a good understanding of what managers and executive leaders want (and need), and what to do when someone asks you to make something "more fun".
Anna Pickard (https://annapickard.com/) is a writer who does more talking about writing than writing. She mainly works as a consultant in Voice and Tone, helping companies sound human, and helping writing teams get their work done. After training in theatre, she worked in journalism, advertising and games, before stumbling into tech. From 2014, she was responsible for moulding, evolving and shaping the voice of Slack, and since leaving in 2020, has worked with Apple, Airbnb, Atlassian and a bunch of other companies that don't begin with A.
11 Sept 2026
How People Work, Live! ... with Dana Chisnell
Dan and Dana come clean and talk candidly about how you need to navigate workplace politics to get things done. That's carrots and sticks, soft power and hard power, when to spend political capital (and whom to spend it on). Plus, code switching, and de-escalating hostile interactions.
Dana Chisnell is a pioneering civic designer dedicated to improving government services through human-centered design. She was the first head of customer experience at the Department of Homeland Security. Dana co-founded the Center for Civic Design, where she led initiatives like the Field Guides to Ensuring Voter Intent, and designed the prototype that is the basis of nearly every digital ballot in the U.S. As a founding member of the U.S. Digital Service, Dana contributed to modernizing federal digital services. She has taught design in government at Harvard Kennedy School and co-authored the seminal Handbook of Usability Testing.
4 Sept 2026
How People Work, Live! ... with Sarah Vieira
Dan and Sarah finally have the mutual support group therapy episode. Sarah talks about what you can do if you don't want to play golf, and Dan makes callbacks to the episode with weaver about firefighters dropping tools and running. There's gentle parenting, repairing relationships, radical acceptance, and a bunch of ways for you to make bids to create trust so you can get things done. And also: what to do when you hit that barrier of someone who just wants to see the world burn.
Sarah Vieira is a product leader and founder of Mother Blackbird, where she helps organizations build better products, websites, and systems. She loves crafts, creative problem solving, and the kind of projects that start with "I wonder if I could make that."
28 Aug 2026
How People Work, Live! ... with Margo Stern
Dan and Margo talk about all the work that goes into your job that isn't your job -- and how much of it is building relationships.
Margo Stern, the author of Good Work: Managing Yourself and Managing Managing, a two-sided book that shares all the tips, tricks, hacks and cheat codes to working in tech. Drawing not only on her experience managing and being an IC at places like Google, Twitter, and Lyft, she shares the wisdom from interviews with PMs, Designers and Engineers who have been there too. Margo is also a Staff Content Designer at Lyft, and she lives in San Francisco, CA.
21 Aug 2026
How People Work, Live! ... with Marcin Wichary
Dan and Marcin talk about communicating what's important about design, video games (of course) and deciding what matters. Plus some AI.
Marcin Wichary, who started his career at Google working on internal tools, the search team, the doodle team, and the HTML advocacy team. He later spent time at Code for America and Medium, and his most recent position has been working as a design director and design architect on the editor team at Figma.
Marcin has also been speaking and writing about craft, typography, and interface design since the early 2010s. In 2024 he published Shift Happens, a book about the history of keyboards and typing, and his most recent endeavour has been a blog about software craft and quality called Unsung.
Recorded on Friday 21 August, 2026.
14 Aug 2026
How People Work, Live! ... with Weaver
In this episode, Dan talks with Weaver about what happens in the first few days of a Layer Aleph engagement, and how crisis conditions offer potential to change how people work.
Weaver is a co-founder of the crisis engineering firm Layer Aleph, which embeds inside organizations to swiftly surface the truth and restore function when stakes are high and trust is low. He previously helped found the United States Digital Service (https://usdigitalserviceorigins.org/) after involvement in the 2013-2014 rescue of Healthcare.gov (http://healthcare.gov/), leading percussive interventions on more than 20 troubled programs inside the United States government, with budgets ranging from $150MM to $1.2T. With co-authors Marina Nitze and Mikey Dickerson, he is co-author of Crisis Engineering. When not travelling to a client, he seeks strength and balance together with his wife as part of a community in the northern midwest of the USA.
Recorded on Friday 14 August, 2026.
31 Jul 2026
How People Work, Live! ... with Russell Davies
Dan and Russell talk about writing, and thinking.
Russell Davies is a writer and strategist who has spent over 40 years thinking about what happens when marketing and services meet the internet. He's worked on communications and digital strategies for organisations like Honda, Nike, Microsoft, Apple, the Government Digital Service and the Co-op. He's currently Marketing and Product Director for The Modern House (https://www.themodernhouse.com/).
Recorded on Friday 31 July, 2026.
24 Jul 2026
How People Work, Live! ... with Pavel Samsonov
Dan and Pavel from the Product Picnic newsletter talk about beating "the fastest gun in UX", why problem framing is fundamentally social, and how stakeholders conflate technical problems with business problems.
Pavel Samsonov, who on top of over 15 years of experience as a Product Manager and UX Designer at industry leading companies also writes The Product Picnic (https://productpicnic.beehiiv.com/) newsletter and is prolific and very professional on Bluesky.
17 Jul 2026
How People Work, Live! ... with Erika Hall
Dan and Erika talk about, well, everything, really.
Erika Hall, co-founder and Director of Strategy at Mule. where she has advocated for the importance of evidence-based design and clear language since the late 20th century. Erika is the author of Just Enough Research (https://www.mulebooks.com/just-enough-research), now in its second edition, and Conversational Design. Erika works to help organizations and individual practitioners apply critical thinking and humanist values to meaningful problems.
Recorded on Friday 17 July, 2026.
10 Jul 2026
How People Work, Live! ... with Matt Jukes
Dan and Matt Jukes talk about what it takes to get understood in an organization, and how to understand the job.
Matt Jukes, a veteran digital leader and product coach with more than twenty five years of experience leading digital and product teams for public service organisations like the Office for National Statistics, Essex County Council, Jisc, the BBC, the Department for Business and Trade, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and the Government Digital Service.All attendees are expected to follow our code of conduct.
Recorded on Friday 10 July, 2026.
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