IME, in most cases, it's the dickhead's fault in the first place. This is often a CTO putting pressure on a dev manager when the bottleneck is ops, or product,

IME, in most cases, it's the dickhead's fault in the first place. This is often a CTO putting pressure on a dev manager when the bottleneck is ops, or product, or putting pressure on product when the bottleneck is dev. The normal rationalization is that "you should be putting pressure on them". The actual reason is that they are putting pressure on you as a show of force, rather than actually wanted it to go faster. This is why the only response to a bad manager is to run away.