Experts Lead Experts

Marty Cagan of the product consultancy SVPG argues that the current push for fewer managers is temporary, and that each craft still needs leaders who are expert in it.

Since AI changed how software is built, many companies have announced fewer managers, and some engineering leaders have gone back to writing code. Marty Cagan, founder of Silicon Valley Product Group (SVPG), a product-management training and consulting firm, calls this a necessary but temporary state. He argues that top product companies follow the principle that experts lead experts, and that leadership matters more as building gets cheaper.

• Under the principle that experts lead experts, whoever leads engineers, product managers or product designers must be expert in that craft.
• Cagan reports that people who spent the past year working hands-on with the new AI tools are returning to decisions on product vision, strategy, team structure and outcomes.
• He also reports that some companies that announced fewer managers have begun to reverse that decision.
• He presents the argument as a prediction and says that it could prove wrong.

Checking work built by AI agents needs a reviewer who knows the craft well enough to spot a plausible error. This link to the review of agent-built work is an inference and is not the author's claim.

27 September 2026: when AI writes part of the work, people need to see what was made, by whom and from what.