Management as technical debt
- YT :: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKdHlasB-nU
- Original title :: Managing Is Actually Technical Debt
When every decision needs a manager, engineers stop building and start waiting - a product question, an architecture exception, and a launch all stall because nobody has been named as the decider. Good management makes ownership clear, resolves decisions at the right boundary, spots risk early, and keeps routine implementation choices close to the people doing the work. Bad management becomes the default router for every missing product decision, adding hand-offs, approvals, and interpretations - a dependency nobody modeled, whose "interest payments" show up as waiting time, repeated context, and duplicate work. A recurring meeting that produces no decision, or a dashboard that changes no decision, is a "context switch with a logo on it."
Fix: map where changes actually wait and who owns each decision; give recurring decisions an owner, a response time, and an escalation path; push implementation choices to the lowest safe level; put expiry dates on temporary approval groups; and kill any ritual once it stops removing a real constraint. A management layer earns its cost only when it makes the system carry less uncertainty, not more.