Some of the best product strategy in my org has consistently come bottom up from junior and mid level engineers. Some of the most out of touch product strategy

Some of the best product strategy in my org has consistently come bottom up from junior and mid level engineers. Some of the most out of touch product strategy has come from principal / staff engineers and senior product managers. All engineers, whether junior or senior, need lots of autonomy to propose and try plans. No engineers needs to be “taught to follow the plan” - that is career death. Meanwhile, the risk of political motives and malicious intent or self-preservation is much higher among senior staff, especially as they become ex-technical. Finally, many products need teams of specialists in various areas, and their team structures don’t resemble fungible full-stack wishful thinking. A good leader tries much harder to give them what they need instead of imposing the fiction they are fungible. So, overall the leader of this post is - overly reductionist - failing to protect autonomy - failing to protect specialization - failing to deal with reality - mentally representing “senior” vs “junior” as “creates orders” vs “follows orders” which puts political authority as a central cultural value. These are all classic, well-known leadership mistakes. I guarantee the company in this example is full of under-appreciated engineers treated like cogs. Even the overall premise of the layoffs is suspect. Nowhere does the article even ask the question of why the critical project failed in the first place. Why was staffing preemptively overallocated? If you fire these people, will you have to hire and retrain new people later when things change again? How costly would that be relative to retaining them now? Why aren’t there senior leaders being fired? The failure of a project with such wide spread ramifications surely isn’t down to a bunch of little guys. Here’s what happened: Using the same overly reductionist, chain of command failed ideas described in this post, other leaders pursued a bad strategy and allocated resources poorly. Now, to avoid being punished and paying the consequences of their failed strategy, i.e. actually firing executives and senior leaders who caused this problem, they need to scapegoat it as an IT downsizing and they need some inexperienced twerp (this CTO) to spas out pretending like some critical calculus was applied to make the heartbreaking least-bad fewest cuts they could. It’s disingenuous to the core. Absolutely this is shitty, low-accountability leadership.