Is the manager job obsolete?
Why companies struggle to connect engineering effort to business outcomes.
Why optimizing your organization is no longer optional
I came across a piece in Business Insider recently that captures something many companies are starting to feel but few said aloud: the role of management in tech is being fundamentally reshaped, and not gradually, but all at once. The headline focuses on layoffs, but that is not the interesting part. What sits underneath is a structural shift in how organizations think about productivity, contribution, and ultimately value creation.
Companies like Coinbase, Block, and Meta are explicitly moving away from “pure managers” and toward what they describe as player-coaches, individuals who are expected to lead while also contributing directly to execution. These new corporate triathletes would have to manage people while contribute to the delivery, and this is basically unrealistic without a deep transformation on how the management function works.
Why this becomes a strategy problem
Most organizations still lack a reliable way to understand how engineering effort translates into outcomes, which means they see activity but not impact, cost but not return, and structure but not contribution. In that context, decisions about hiring, promotions, team structure, or investment are not grounded in a clear understanding of the system, but rather in partial signals and interpretation. When that happens, headcount decisions start to resemble a lottery, not because leaders lack judgment, but because the system does not provide the clarity required to make those decisions with confidence.
What we still lack insight into is why the traditional manager role is becoming less necessary in its historical form. For decades, a lot of management was fundamentally a function of information gathering, context distribution, and communication alignment, tasks that AI is increasingly able to perform faster and, in many cases, better than humans.
What becomes more valuable instead are the capabilities AI lacks: empathy, deep understanding of human motivations, judgment, trust-building, and the ability to help people grow and perform at their best. The opportunity now is not to remove managers, but to free them from operational burden so they can focus on the uniquely human side of leadership and on helping their teams become better.
This is precisely why the shift described in the article matters. When companies move toward fewer traditional managers and more “player-coaches,” what they are implicitly doing is removing layers whose primary function was information gathering, status translation, and context distribution, not as a matter of cost reduction, but as a way to realign the organization around contribution and impact.
What optimizing your organization actually means
Optimizing an organization, in this context, is not about reducing layers for the sake of efficiency. It is about removing the intermediate levels that companies built as a necessary evil to move information and context across increasingly complex organizations.
What organizations need now is not more information gatherers and communication routers, but more team enablers. Leaders whose value comes from empowering people, developing talent, understanding motivations, resolving friction, and helping teams operate at their best.
Why optimizing your organization is no longer optional
I came across a piece in Business Insider recently that captures something many companies are starting to feel but few said aloud: the role of management in tech is being fundamentally reshaped, and not gradually, but all at once. The headline focuses on layoffs, but that is not the interesting part. What sits underneath is a structural shift in how organizations think about productivity, contribution, and ultimately value creation.
Companies like Coinbase, Block, and Meta are explicitly moving away from “pure managers” and toward what they describe as player-coaches, individuals who are expected to lead while also contributing directly to execution. These new corporate triathletes would have to manage people while contribute to the delivery, and this is basically unrealistic without a deep transformation on how the management function works.
Why this becomes a strategy problem
Most organizations still lack a reliable way to understand how engineering effort translates into outcomes, which means they see activity but not impact, cost but not return, and structure but not contribution. In that context, decisions about hiring, promotions, team structure, or investment are not grounded in a clear understanding of the system, but rather in partial signals and interpretation. When that happens, headcount decisions start to resemble a lottery, not because leaders lack judgment, but because the system does not provide the clarity required to make those decisions with confidence.
What we still lack insight into is why the traditional manager role is becoming less necessary in its historical form. For decades, a lot of management was fundamentally a function of information gathering, context distribution, and communication alignment, tasks that AI is increasingly able to perform faster and, in many cases, better than humans.
What becomes more valuable instead are the capabilities AI lacks: empathy, deep understanding of human motivations, judgment, trust-building, and the ability to help people grow and perform at their best. The opportunity now is not to remove managers, but to free them from operational burden so they can focus on the uniquely human side of leadership and on helping their teams become better.
This is precisely why the shift described in the article matters. When companies move toward fewer traditional managers and more “player-coaches,” what they are implicitly doing is removing layers whose primary function was information gathering, status translation, and context distribution, not as a matter of cost reduction, but as a way to realign the organization around contribution and impact.
What optimizing your organization actually means
Optimizing an organization, in this context, is not about reducing layers for the sake of efficiency. It is about removing the intermediate levels that companies built as a necessary evil to move information and context across increasingly complex organizations.
What organizations need now is not more information gatherers and communication routers, but more team enablers. Leaders whose value comes from empowering people, developing talent, understanding motivations, resolving friction, and helping teams operate at their best.
