Management Is a Bandwidth Problem
The job is not knowing. The job is allocating attention.
[ essay ]
Management is a bandwidth problem. The job is not knowing the answers — it is allocating attention across a problem space that always exceeds supply.
I learned this the hard way running a small platform team through a quarter where every stakeholder had a P0. The roadmap did not fail because we lacked skill. It failed because I never named what we were publicly stopping. Unmade decisions leak: the team keeps spending compute on work leadership has silently deprioritized, because silence reads as “maybe still important.” Three half-funded initiatives cost more than one finished one.1
New managers optimize for coverage — be helpful, stay informed, keep options open. Experienced managers optimize for throughput — decide, communicate the cut, absorb the discomfort so the team can stop guessing.
Spend bandwidth like it costs real money — because it does, in slipped dates and quiet attrition. Every item you refuse to rank is a tax on everyone downstream.
— JV · Dark Heart Labs.
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Andy Grove, High Output Management (Random House, 1983) — on managerial leverage and the cost of undistributed decisions across an organization. ↩