For years, tech managers climbed the ladder by mastering the art of orchestration—executing plans with military precision, optimizing sprints, and shielding teams from chaos. But as they reach senior levels or join innovative startups, many face a brutal awakening: their finely honed skills suddenly feel obsolete. They’ve become experts in a discipline the industry is rapidly outgrowing. This isn’t just about missed promotions; it’s a systemic reckoning for tech leadership in the age of ambiguity.

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The Orchestration Trap: When Efficiency Masks Stagnation

At the heart of this crisis lies a fundamental dichotomy. Orchestration-heavy roles focus narrowly on execution: protecting team bandwidth, refining processes, and prioritizing tasks handed down from above. Managers in these environments become virtuosos of control—think sprint planning savants or dependency-wrangling gurus. Yet they often neglect the first half of the problem-solving spectrum:

  1. Problem discovery (identifying what to solve)
  2. Problem selection (aligning with stakeholders)
  3. Solution discovery (brainstorming approaches)
  4. Solution selection (choosing the right path)

As engineer-turned-CTO Will Larson observes in his analysis:

'Folks who’ve only worked in orchestration-heavy roles often have no idea they are expected to perform all of these. There’s not just a skill gap—there’s an awareness gap that the work exists.'

This blindness manifests in telltale signs: over-indexing on prioritization as a 'solution of first resort,' accepting stakeholder requests without questioning their validity, or defaulting to rigid sprint cadences. These tactics work brilliantly in predictable environments but crumble when autonomy is expected.

Why Tech’s Leadership Landscape Is Shifting Underfoot

The industry’s pivot away from orchestration-heavy roles isn’t accidental. After overinvesting in mid-level managers focused purely on execution during the 2010s, companies now aggressively flatten hierarchies and empower senior leaders to drive vision. Larson dismisses the popular narrative linking this to LLM-driven productivity boosts:

'This change was already underway before LLMs became prominent.'
The real driver? A hard-earned lesson that effectiveness trumps efficiency. Building the wrong product flawlessly is worthless—and in competitive tech ecosystems, only leaders who define problems and architect solutions create lasting impact.

Rewiring Your Management DNA: The Leadership Core Loop

For managers navigating this transition, Larson prescribes a non-negotiable four-step 'core loop' to replace old orchestration habits:

1. **Identify** problems your team should tackle
2. **Decide** on a solution destination
3. **Explain** the path to your team and stakeholders
4. **Communicate** progress through data and narrative

This framework demands uncomfortable evolutions:
- Mine for problems bottom-up: If your roadmap relies solely on top-down directives, you’re failing step one. Regularly solicit pain points from engineers—their insights often reveal high-impact opportunities executives overlook.
- Own solution selection: This isn’t just your product manager’s job. Senior tech leaders must deeply understand their domain to evaluate trade-offs. Can’t reason about your codebase? Larson warns: 'Urgently write down steps to close that gap... your team sees you as not meeting expectations.'
- Challenge misalignment fearlessly: If executives push flawed directives, your role is to persuade and pivot—not comply silently. Orchestration-heavy veterans often underestimate this expectation, leading to team disillusionment.

The Invisible Price of Stagnation

Ignoring this shift isn’t just career-limiting; it risks obsolescence. Organizations tolerate competent orchestrators in mid-level roles but rarely promote them. Worse, they become bottlenecks in cultures valuing autonomy—their preference for rigid control stifles innovation. The path forward requires embracing discomfort: writing occasional pull requests to stay technically grounded, drafting product specs to sharpen solution-thinking, and treating stakeholder pushback as collaboration, not rebellion. In today’s tech landscape, leadership isn’t about following a script—it’s about writing it.