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This is one of those “Product Management 101” things that engineers are surprisingly bad at. I couldn’t agree more that this is an essential skill for engineers (especially sr engineers), whether they’re working on infra, growth, or product.

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At least in my experience, management tends to break engineers of this 'skill'. They usually just want us to build whatever they say. Never mind if we could tweak the underlying business process to make the technical system better and even save the business money.

> They usually just want us to build whatever they say.

a bad manager would.

But also, an engineer capable of this is basically CxO material - which threatens said manager's career progress!

Not just bad managers. At large companies the processes and leadership structure are sometimes too focused on meeting dates (usually arbitrary) and sticking to the initial plan/design. I get that we won't change course for everything or we will end up with scope creep or in a loop of refactoring, but it would make sense for the items with the largest benefit or clear net value-add.

Thanks for the note and I'm glad the piece was useful!

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