At risk of sounding brash, you have a very traditional (old school) mentality on what management is. The teams currently seeing the best results are the ones e

At risk of sounding brash, you have a very traditional (old school) mentality on what management is. The teams currently seeing the best results are the ones embedding their engineers in the discovery process so they can deeply understand the customer's problems and drive appropriate solutions. It's a bit "less efficient" upfront, but pays dividends during delivery when they can more appropriately model their code and make meaningful decisions without always relying on an outside party. My role as a manager isn't telling my team how to solve problems. It's helping them identify the most meaningful problems and guiding them towards solutions against those problems. Over time this means that I actually spend less and less time "managing" them and more time listening.