Maya Hanks: The Work Behind the Work
Maya's title is Studio Manager. That covers about a third of what she actually does. On any given day she's moving through backend operations, strategy, talent, HR, and business development, running projects, supervising them, advising on them. The title is tidy. The job isn't, and that's precisely why it takes someone like her to hold it.
Ask her what the role really is, and she doesn't describe tasks. She describes responsibility: for whether clients are happy with the work, and just as much for how it feels to be on the E.TBD team while doing it. She calls it quality assurance, but the thing she's actually assuring isn't output. It's experience. She lights up talking about clients who liked working with the team as people, and contractors who say they like it here. That's not a metric anyone puts in a report. It's also, by her account, the whole point.
Her own definition of good operations reads like a description of what she works to maintain day to day: everyone clear on their role, systems in place for most things, problems treated as solvable rather than as crises, and the work itself feeling collaborative and, somehow, fun. It's not a wish list. It's a working standard, and keeping the studio living up to it is a large part of what she does.
That instinct for people carries over from years as a certified personal trainer, one thread among several industries she's worked across. Trainers learn to meet people where they are. That's the same environment Maya works to maintain at E.TBD: one where people feel understood enough that hard work goes well, and more often than not, gets enjoyed along the way. She carries that into every project, period.
None of this shows up on an org chart. Most of it isn't supposed to. But it's a real part of why E.TBD runs the way it does, and why the people inside it, and outside it, keep wanting to stay.
