Oof. That smacks of hubris and valley-buzzwordism.
> Leaders will own much more, with as many as 15+ direct reports.
> Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor.
So, a manager who's managing 15 people AND expected to ship -- that sounds awful for both sides.
Right?? I saw that too. My first thought is that any good managers left will be racing for the exit. You can't fake "managing 15 people" with AI. You have to actually have the 1:1s and do the performance calibrations. How are they going to have time left for IC work??
They'll switch to async communications for everything, and ideally have a bot that answers Mm-humm like a psychologist on his chair.
More seriously, the solution is to move to a flatter org, but that's a drastic change with unknown consequences for most companies.
I feel like managers should be able to contribute. Managing a good team isn't that hard, though managing a bad team (or a good team in the midst of a ton of bad processes) is a nightmare.
Notable is what they're not doing--annual reviews. This duty is now handled by the all seeing "intelligence" machine that can evaluate employees in real-time.
Freedom for who, exactly? Coinbase's executives, I suppose.