Jenae designs organisations where commercial performance and employee experience strengthen each other. As Head of People at Ideally, she's helping scale an AI-powered market research platform through rapid global growth.

Previously, she spent nearly a decade partnering with founders, boards and leadership teams through Humankind and her consultancy, Un/Bound, helping ambitious startups and scale-ups navigate growth and build for the future of work. With a background in psychology, general management and competitive sport, Jenae is passionate about creating the conditions for sustainable high performance in high-pressure environments.

She brings a human-centred design mindset to the People function, helping organisations move beyond traditional HR and build a People function that accelerates growth, innovation and performance.

Delayering, player-coaches, spans of control blowing out.

The manager role is being rewritten and nobody agreed on the new job description. Two teams go head to head on one question: do we need managers anymore?

Expect unfiltered positions from people who have added management layers and taken them out again inside real companies, a moderator keeping them honest, and a live audience vote that settles it.

Bring your own view. You'll need it when voting opens.

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What you'll leave with:

1. A working definition of what a manager is actually for in 2026, including where new model holds up (if there is one) and where it falls over.
2. The strongest case from both sides, argued properly, so you can pressure-test your own structure instead of copying whatever the last big flattening announcement did.
3. Practical signals for when to add or strip a management layer, and what you have to fund instead when you take one out.