“There’s no greys, only white that’s got grubby… Sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself.”

— Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum

For the last few months, this quote has been rattling around my brain like a warning bell on repeat. Not because I’m suddenly rereading Discworld (although, always a good idea), but because I keep seeing the same pattern crop up in design orgs, tech teams, and product squads across the board:

We’re treating people like tools. Like Jira tickets. Like headcount. Like “throughput.”

And yeah, it sounds dramatic—but look around.

We’re so obsessed with what our teams are shipping, we’ve stopped caring about who is doing the shipping, and how they’re actually doing. Not in the “how productive are they?” sense. I mean how are they sleeping at night? How are they coping with the tenth round of leadership “realignment”?

In short: we’ve forgotten that people are people. And Terry was right. That’s the start of all the rot.

This Is What It Looks Like When You Forget the People

I’ve seen it play out in ways that look harmless on the surface:

• A team quietly burns out under the radar because their manager never asks how they’re doing.
• Promotions that only go to the loudest voices, not the most generous contributors.
• Performance reviews with “impact” scores, where the “impact” was achieved through unpaid emotional labor and cleaning up messes someone else made.

This isn’t just bad leadership—it’s unethical design management. And leaders in our field have been screaming about it.

Monteiro Would Have Fired You Already

Let’s bring Mike Monteiro into the room—because if we’re talking ethics, you bet he’s already yelling.

“Design is a job. And if you’re managing people, that means your job is them.”
— Mike Monteiro, Design Is a Job

If you think your job as a manager is to track deliverables or optimize story points, Mike would happily fire you on page two. Managing designers means advocating for them, shielding them, developing them. It does not mean commodifying them for speed.

And if you’re not doing that work? Then you’re treating people as things. Congrats, you’re halfway to being a villain in a Pratchett novel.

Amy Santee Says It Plain

Career strategist and former UX researcher Amy Santee regularly reminds us that design management is deeply personal. This isn’t abstract theory—it’s about power and the impact it has on people’s lives.

“Bad management is a systemic problem, not a fluke.”
— Amy Santee

She’s talking about how the system is designed to ignore the personhood of employees. The feedback loops are broken, the power dynamics are unchecked, and a whole lot of people in ‘leadership’ have never been taught to lead. Just to extract.

You want better outcomes? Treat your team like human beings, not deliverable factories. It’s really that simple. And yes, that means resisting the system you’re in. It means making some noise.

Vivianne Castillo Will See You Now

Vivianne Castillo—founder of HmntyCntrd—takes it even deeper. She’s one of the loudest voices in our industry calling for emotional intelligence, ethics, and a return to humanity in how we lead.

She talks openly about trauma-informed leadership, moral courage, and radical care in design. And when Vivianne says, “we cannot build humane experiences without humane organizations,”—that hits.

Because if you’re ignoring the people on your team, you can bet your product isn’t humane either.

So What Do We Do Instead?

If you’re in a leadership role, your job is no longer “doing the work.” Your job is enabling others to do the work. And that means:

• Get curious about your people, not just your deadlines.
• Build trust like it’s a UX deliverable. Iterate. Validate. Revisit.
• Reward emotional labor. Normalize feedback. Share credit like it’s oxygen.
• Stop worshiping at the altar of “velocity.” Velocity doesn’t hold your team together—empathy does.

Because leadership is not neutral. It’s design. You’re designing the culture. You’re shaping people’s careers. You’re deciding if someone goes home energized or depleted.

And if you’re not actively designing for that?

Then you’re letting the system design it for you—and that system is broken.

TL;DR: People Are Not Things

So yeah, I’m going to keep yelling about this. Because I’ve seen what it looks like when leaders forget. And I’ve seen what it can be when they remember.

To every manager out there: if you’re treating your people like things, you’re sinning. Full stop. And no metrics dashboard is going to save you from that.