Tiffany Patel is the founder of herHR, where she partners with growing startups as a fractional HR leader and strategic advisor. With 15 years of HR experience, she helps founders and leadership teams build practical people strategies that scale—from compliance and infrastructure to manager coaching, performance, and employee experience.

Having been the first HR hire at multiple organizations, Tiffany understands the realities of building HR from the ground up and brings a pragmatic, no-fluff perspective to the challenges startups face. She believes there are rarely one-size-fits-all answers in HR and enjoys challenging conventional thinking while helping companies build workplaces where both people and businesses can thrive.

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.