The Builder Shepherd

The meeting was about the meeting. The strategy deck was about the strategy deck. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, the actual work stopped getting done. The 'Pure Manager' Is Dead. Good.

Coinbase just cut 14% of its workforce and eliminated the "pure manager" role outright. CEO Brian Armstrong's memo is blunt: flatten to five layers max below CEO and COO, move to a player-coach model, and stand up AI-native pods where a single person commands a fleet of agents. Jack Dorsey and Sequoia's Roelof Botha said the quiet part loud in April: "There is no need for a permanent middle management layer. Everything else the old hierarchy did, the system coordinates." Dorsey's stated ideal? Every employee reports directly to him. No layers at all.

People are shocked. I am not.

I Have Been Living This Argument

I have been a sales lead. A growth lead. A discovery and research lead. A design lead. A technical lead. An entrepreneur. A product strategist. Depending on who I am talking to and what they understand about product management, they put me in a different box. That is fine. I have learned to work with it.

What is not fine — what genuinely grinds my gears — is when someone who has never shipped a line of code, never run a discovery sprint, never sat in a design crit and defended a decision with data, looks at me and says: "Yeah, but you're more technical. I'm more of a strategist."

No. You are not.

I am a strategist. I worked my ass off to also become technical. Strategy came first. The technical depth came from years of deliberate, uncomfortable effort — learning to code, learning to architect, learning to speak the language of the people doing the actual building. That combination is not a downgrade. It is the upgrade. And people who claim pure strategy as a credential while remaining deliberately ignorant of delivery are not strategists. They are expensive overhead with a good handshake.

What "Pure Manager" Actually Means

Let's call it what it is. The pure manager role — the person whose entire job is coordinating other people's work, running standups, managing up, and producing status reports — is a coordination tax. Armstrong literally used that phrase. "These elements slow the business down and create a coordination tax," he wrote.

I have watched this play out on real projects. The person who cannot read a ticket, cannot review a PR, cannot speak to a design decision — but who books the meetings, owns the roadmap doc, and presents the quarterly update — is not leading. They are brokering. And in an AI-native org, that brokerage function is being automated out from under them in real time.

Armstrong wrote: "AI is changing how we work. Over the past year, I've watched engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks."

If a small focused team with AI agents can now do what a 12-person org used to do, the math on a coordination layer gets brutal fast.

The Technical Strategist Is Not a Contradiction

Here is the thing nobody wants to say out loud in polite company: the best product leaders I have ever worked with are deeply technical and deeply strategic. Not one or the other. Both. They can read the architecture and write the strategy doc. They can run a discovery sprint and review the pull request. They can explain a business outcome to a board and explain a data model to an engineer.

That is not a unicorn. That is a player-coach. That is what the market is now demanding at scale.

Reid Hoffman put it plainly in a recent Forbes interview: if AI agents can draft, research, analyze, code, summarize, test, and generate ideas, the human role shifts toward orchestration — deciding what to delegate, how to combine agents, how to check outputs, how to frame good questions. That is a deeply technical judgment call dressed in strategic clothing. You cannot do it from a PowerPoint.

The Airbnb CEO has said publicly he does not think people managers "will have any value in the future." That is probably a little far. But the direction is correct.

The Masking Problem

I am neurodivergent. I mask. I chameleon into whatever the room needs. If the gap is technical, I fill it. If the gap is strategic, I fill it. If the gap is facilitation or sales or design, I fill it. That is not a party trick — it is a survival mechanism that became a professional edge.

The problem is that it makes it easy for people to misread you. They see you coding and decide you are "the technical one." They see you in a strategy session and decide you are "the thinker." They see you running a client call and decide you are "the sales guy." None of those labels are wrong. None of them are complete.

The technical product manager gets misread constantly. The assumption is that because you fought hard to become technical, you must have sacrificed something on the strategy side. The opposite is true. The technical depth is the strategy advantage. You cannot build a product strategy worth a damn if you do not understand what is actually hard to build, what is cheap to build, and what the engineering team is going to push back on.

When a pure strategist — someone who has never shipped anything, never run a sprint, never been in a war room at 2am with a production incident — tells me they are "above" the technical work, I hear one thing: I have never had to be accountable for outcomes.

That is a red flag. Every time.

The Org Chart Is Catching Up to Reality

The flattening happening right now at Coinbase, Block, Meta, Snap, and Airbnb is not a threat to good people. It is the market finally pricing in what capable builders already knew. A BCG survey of 625 CEOs and board members found that 60% of CEOs say their boards are rushing AI transformation. The pressure is real and it is coming from every direction.

But here is what the org chart flattening actually separates: people who do things from people who ran meetings about doing things.

The player-coach model is not new. It is what good teams have always looked like when the bureaucracy has not yet calcified. A senior engineer who mentors and ships. A product lead who facilitates and decides and builds. A designer who runs research and delivers production-ready specs. These people have always existed. The org chart just spent twenty years burying them under layers of people who managed the people who managed the work.

What Survives

I want to be precise here because the nuance matters. I am not saying management is dead. I am saying pure management — management as a terminal identity with no delivery obligation — is dead. The functions that survive are:

• Judgment under ambiguity. Deciding what to build when the data is incomplete.
• Context-holding. Knowing the history, the constraints, the team dynamics, the customer pain — and synthesizing it fast.
• Orchestration. Directing agents, humans, and systems toward a coherent outcome.
• Accountability. Owning the result. Not the process. The result.

None of those functions require you to be a full-stack engineer. They do require you to understand the work well enough to make real decisions about it. That is the bar. It is not that high. A lot of people just never bothered to clear it because they did not have to.

Now they do.

The Correction Is Overdue

I have been building this argument in practice for years — at AltonTech, at Virgent AI, on every project where I have had to explain why a technically fluent product lead delivers better outcomes than a pure strategist paired with a technical team that has no real product ownership. The data is in the work. The outcomes are in the shipped products.

The companies flattening their orgs right now are not being cruel. They are being honest. Strategy without execution is expensive overhead. Coordination without context is a tax. Management without delivery is a liability.

If you are a player-coach — if you can hold the strategy and do the work — you are not threatened by any of this. You are finally being priced correctly.

If you are a pure manager whose entire value proposition is running the meeting about the meeting, this is your moment to decide: learn the craft or get out of the way.

I know which one I chose.

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Are you a technical product leader navigating this exact identity problem — getting boxed in as "the technical one" when you know you are the strategist? I want to hear from you. Drop a comment or reach out directly. This conversation is just getting started.