Anant Jain

The Manager-of-Manager+ Problem in AI Adoption

Tech

We are living through the single greatest explosion of technical leverage in history. Engineering teams are reporting 30-40% gains in coding speed. Tools like Claude Code feel like magic.

Yet, look at the quarterly results. Are products shipping 40% faster? Are customer satisfaction scores up 40%? Is revenue growing 40% more efficiently? For most enterprises, the answer is a hard no.

This is the modern productivity paradox. We have "Intelligence Abundance" at our fingertips, but we aren't seeing a proportionate boost in customer outcomes.

I have a feeling that the bottleneck isn't the technology or the engineers. It’s the Manager-of-Managers+ (MoM+) layer (Directors/VPs), the top third of the management pyramid, not resetting their workflows and expectations in the age of AI abundance.

For a long time, it's been considered acceptable for MoM+ layer to stop writing code. "Learn to delegate", "Scale yourself", "Don't bottleneck your team", "Do the job you're hired to do" — the list goes on. I strongly believe that not writing code at this layer should no longer be considered acceptable, for one has to get their hands dirty to feel the ongoing Mag 9 earthquake in software engineering. Not doing so is leading to the MoM+ layer staying trapped in a "2023 Operating System", still managing for scarcity in a world of abundance.

The "2023 Trap": Managing for Scarcity

Until 2023 or so, engineering hours were the most expensive, scarce resource in a company. The “modern” engineering "Management OS" was built to protect that resource. In the 2023 mindset:

  • We obsess over estimation. We spend weeks grooming backlogs to ensure expensive developer time isn't "wasted" on the wrong task.
  • We write heavy specs. We demand PRDs and Technical Design Docs before a single line of code is written because rewriting code is costly.
  • We scale linearly. "To do 2x the work, I need 2x the headcount."

The MoM+ layer exists to minimize risk and predict timelines. That worked when the code was expensive.

The "2025 Reality": Intelligence Abundance

Today, the cost of writing code has plummeted to near zero. In this new reality, the constraint is no longer "fingers on the keyboard". The constraints are context, taste, and decision-making agency.

The builders know this. The CEO's of successful companies operating in "founder mode" know this. The "Frozen Middle" layer of management misses this. They see AI as an efficiency tool, a way to clear bugs/tickets faster. They should be seeing it as a leverage tool, a way to explore three different architectural solutions in the time it used to take to debate one.

What should you do about it?

If you are wondering why all those tokens you bought is resulting in a lot of chatter and excitement, but ~flat growth in customer outcomes, you have to dismantle the 2023 scarcity mindset around you:

  1. Everyone is a builder: Expect everyone in your company to write code. Or atleast, be managing a team of agents in addition to themselves / their team / their org.
  • The Shift: The days of "pure people managers" have been on the way out for a while, and 2025 feels like the last year when this profession ever justfiably existed.
  1. Restructure for "The Diamond": The traditional "Pyramid" team structure (many juniors, few seniors) is dead. AI can do the work we expected early-career engineers to do. The bottleneck has moved to the architecture and review phases. We need barrels, not ammunition.
  • The Shift: Hire more Senior/Staff engineers builders who can wield AI to own their entire vertical slice, from idea to iterating to customer love. You need fewer people writing code and more people with the taste to know what generated code solves customer problems and is reliable, scalable, and maintainable.
  1. Kill the "Spec-First" Culture: Stop rewarding people for beautiful documentation and perfect roadmaps. Start rewarding prototypes that users can touch and feel. Make it a policy: for any new feature idea, the first review isn't a document read-through; it's a demo of a working prototype.
  • The Shift: Force the organization to think in working software, not abstract plans. When code is cheap, "building to think" is cheaper than "writing to think."
  1. Rewire Your Metrics: Stop asking "How long will this take?" That is a scarcity question. Start asking "How many iterations can we test this week?" That is an abundance question.
  • The Shift: If you haven't aready, move the goalposts from Output to Outcomes. If your team ships one thing over a quarter and that fails, that's a failure. If they ship five variations and one wins, that's success.
  1. Watch for the “immune system” kicking in: If the job of your middle management was "managing capacity," and that capacity just became infinite, they need a new role. You have to inspire and incentivize these folks to rewire their thinking, and define the future of what engineering leadership looks like in this era.
  • The Shift: In my experience, every MoM+ person I've met usually got there because they are exceptional builders with great taste, and I've seen most tenured folks I follow on X have been excited to pick up coding again — we're all beginners in this new world.

The next 100x company won't just have 10x better engineers. It will also have 10x better “Management OS” that has the courage to stop managing for the past and embrace the Intelligence Abundance we live in now.