At this point we are almost certainly talking past one another. I've never been at a company where management didn't have the final say. In your world where managers don't decide anything important, I guess they are just HR secretaries? They have 1:1s with people and try to figure out who needs to be replaced and who should be promoted? What is that like?
A PO recently chastised me after I worked with a user who wanted a date field to default to today. I was asked "who told you to do this, where is the JIRA that described this work?"
This is really the root of the problem. Implicit in all these titles ending in manager is decision making authority, and the selection process does not in practice produce better decision makers. A competent engineer experiencing a customer problem first hand is the smartest and best informed person in the room. They should be expected to make the best decisions about how to use their time and skills. But there is a charade that plays out involving * managers, who have been given decision making authority. They either agree ceremoniously or look stupid with little corrective consequence.
We potentially agree on quite a bit and maybe might not talk past each other.
With regards to our differences, I view software management more as a leadership role rather than as a decision making role. We won't quibble that leaders need to make important decisions, we both agree there. Yet, providing direction is different from deciding direction. That is my point, software managers are deciding neither "what" nor "how", and thus their role is (IMHO) primarily more leadership rather than decision making.
By one metric, I'd suggest software managers are most responsible for helping their team maximize the ratio of time spent focused on-task to the time spent dealing on noise. While that is an interesting metric, it's still hard to tease out the effects of organization and team structure from the role of just one person who is meant to largely coordinate (AKA: direct or lead) and enhance those networking effects.
My MO is deciding anything myself where I feel my chosen solution is Pareto better and force the PO to clarify/specify where customer feedback is contradictory or unclear.
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At this point we are almost certainly talking past one another. I've never been at a company where management didn't have the final say. In your world where managers don't decide anything important, I guess they are just HR secretaries? They have 1:1s with people and try to figure out who needs to be replaced and who should be promoted? What is that like?
This is really the root of the problem. Implicit in all these titles ending in manager is decision making authority, and the selection process does not in practice produce better decision makers. A competent engineer experiencing a customer problem first hand is the smartest and best informed person in the room. They should be expected to make the best decisions about how to use their time and skills. But there is a charade that plays out involving * managers, who have been given decision making authority. They either agree ceremoniously or look stupid with little corrective consequence.
We potentially agree on quite a bit and maybe might not talk past each other.
With regards to our differences, I view software management more as a leadership role rather than as a decision making role. We won't quibble that leaders need to make important decisions, we both agree there. Yet, providing direction is different from deciding direction. That is my point, software managers are deciding neither "what" nor "how", and thus their role is (IMHO) primarily more leadership rather than decision making.
By one metric, I'd suggest software managers are most responsible for helping their team maximize the ratio of time spent focused on-task to the time spent dealing on noise. While that is an interesting metric, it's still hard to tease out the effects of organization and team structure from the role of just one person who is meant to largely coordinate (AKA: direct or lead) and enhance those networking effects.
My MO is deciding anything myself where I feel my chosen solution is Pareto better and force the PO to clarify/specify where customer feedback is contradictory or unclear.