>asking engineers to be in charge is a burden I don't think many want. if your environment has a significant amount of elements that engineers (or generally -

>asking engineers to be in charge is a burden I don't think many want. if your environment has a significant amount of elements that engineers (or generally - employees) wouldn't want to be in charge for, then you are already deep into the problem and the shortest solution here is to assign managers to be in charge of those things. The key is to not allow the situation to degrade into creating "demand" for managers. For example, once you create one manager for a group, s/he would want to talk to somebody, preferably managers, from other groups. That burden on the other groups would naturally trigger response - creating managers in the other groups. That starts to structure the information and decision flow the way that rank-and-file employees lose much of the visibility into the product and business and thus lose the ability (and motivation) to take even small decisions, thus requiring even more management ...