"The deeper function of hierarchy is information routing. The org is too large for any single person to see the whole picture, so you install layers of managers to aggregate signals from the front lines, synthesize them, and pass them up."
"Most of the organizational machinery we take for granted exists to solve this problem. Meetings, status updates, steering committees, quarterly business reviews - these are all information-routing mechanisms."
"The real bottleneck is translation cost. PM's intent gets encoded into a document. A designer decodes that document and re-encodes it as a visual. An engineer decodes the visual and re-encodes it as code."
"Every translation loses fidelity. Every translation requires alignment meetings. Every translation generates wait time - not because people are slow, but because the act of making one person's understanding legible to another is inherently complex."
Organizations are integrating AI into workflows without reevaluating their foundational structures. The core elements of a company are people, hierarchy, and information flow. Hierarchy serves as a mechanism for routing information rather than just authority. Traditional organizational processes, such as meetings and reviews, exist to facilitate knowledge transfer, which is often costly. The product development process illustrates this bottleneck, where translation costs between roles lead to delays and inefficiencies, highlighting the need for improved communication and alignment.
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