Just because it is the reality doesn't mean it can't be critiqued though, right? If the CEO doesn't have insight into this situation because their attention is

Just because it is the reality doesn't mean it can't be critiqued though, right? If the CEO doesn't have insight into this situation because their attention is divided - maybe the CEO should provide the people closer to the problem with the information they need to do their jobs, and trust that they've hired good people who will digest this information, prioritize appropriately, and get the job done? If they can't trust that's the case, then isn't that the problem we should be discussing? Maybe the CEO should focus on the strategic direction of the company and securing the investment required to implement it, and not manage projects at the feature level? Generally I find that managers are awesome at facilitating stuff and making sure information gets where it needs to go but that when they dictate it leads to bad decision making because they don't have the proper insight. This becomes exacerbated as you add levels of indirection are between the manager dictating decisions and the people on the ground implementing them. That isn't per say their fault, it's just the dynamics of hierarchies. As information travels up the hierarchy it becomes more essentialized and nonspecific. It loses fidelity. Statistics can travel up the hierarchy, experience can't. So that engineer who's close to the problem has this rich first hand information about the system, and the CEO has a spreadsheet and third- or forth-hand accounts of the situation on the ground. There's certainly a lot of global, systemic insights you can make from that position and useful work to be done. But it's probably not whether a individual feature of a broader project should or should not be implemented. Internal salesmanship is a bandaid, but structuring the organization differently is a solution.