How have you found success balancing these things? It’s been my experience that managers of the first group eventually become unintentional members of the second group, even despite their best efforts to maintain productivity of their subordinates with intentional prioritization and grooming exercises because the business wants that new feature yesterday, and not getting it means lost revenue, angry customers and negative performance reviews.

What happens though when the business puts these types of middle managers in the impossible position of not being able to say “no, this isn’t a priority right now” but still expected to maintain the same amounts of engineering productivity and feature throughput?

I didn’t write this article, but it sums up my headspace, currently: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/stop-doing-more-less-2019-mat...