In my experience, there's a lot of two-way communication and decision-making with good managers and good employees (and perhaps even more is required with bad m

In my experience, there's a lot of two-way communication and decision-making with good managers and good employees (and perhaps even more is required with bad managers and good employees...). The higher up the org chart someone is, the more high-level their view is, not from ignorance but from necessity. They can easily have ideas that sound great on paper but might not be so great once you account for the nuts and bolts of whatever subsystem(s) would have to change to implement that idea. So if a manager proposes an idea that only sounds good in theory but would be a terrible idea in practice, management needs to rely on their engineers to do their part and explain when and why that is. It's kind of a dance with a lot of gray areas, because engineers/managers/designers all have their own biases and blind spots and gaps in knowledge, and prioritize things differently. But as long as everyone knows what they're doing and can communicate effectively to people with different backgrounds, it's ideal. Of course there are plenty of terrible managers who don't know what they don't know and don't take useful feedback. And there are terrible engineers who don't know how to provide useful feedback. But with ideal personnel and a good power dynamic, everyone works together in such a way as to cancel out each other's blind spots and add to each other's expertise.