Anant Jain

Managing for Abundance, not Scarcity

Tech

We are living through the single greatest explosion of technical leverage in history. Engineering teams are feeling multiple factors of gain in building speed. Claude Code feel like magic.

Yet, look at the outcomes at the end of a quarter. Did products ship faster? Is revenue growing 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.

The engineers (at least the best ones) are hacking at warp speed on their weekend projects. The CEOs (usually builders themselves) are doing the same, and wondering why their engineering org isn't moving faster.

My hypothesis is that the bottleneck is the middle layer (Directors/VPs), usually the top third of the management pyramid, not resetting their workflows and expectations in this age of AI abundance.

Let's dig into why. For a long time, it's been considered acceptable for the middle 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 of advice for new managers to step away from code 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. Everything we knew about software engineering has changed in the past year. All the roles, from an L3 software engineer to an M10 VP need a reset right away.

Not getting their hands dirty is leading to the middle layer staying trapped in a "2023 Operating System", still managing for scarcity in a world of abundance.

Here's what I mean by that:

The "2023 Trap": Managing for Scarcity

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

  • We obsess over estimation. We spend weeks grooming backlogs, building project Gantts, etc. 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 middle layer existed to minimize risk and predict timelines. That worked when the code was expensive.

The "2026 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 multiple solutions in the time it used to take to debate one.

What should you do about it?

As a CEO, 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 in your company before it's too late.

  1. Everyone has to be a builder: Expect everyone in your company, no matter their level, to write code. There's no way around this.
  • 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. Everyone should be expected to land impact through technical contributions as well.
  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 launch this month?" 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 iterations and learn from customers along the way, that's a win.
  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 and define the future of what great engineering leadership looks like in this era.
  • The Shift: In my experience, every engineering manager I've met usually got there because they were exceptional builders with great taste as an engineer. If anything, I've seen the best CTOs / engineering leaders I follow on X have been thrilled to pick up coding after decades of letting those skills atrophy — 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 “Engineering Management OS” that has the courage to stop managing for the past and start embracing the Intelligence Abundance we live in now.