Inga Pflaumer

Management Is Dead, Leadership Is Not

Engineering teams are getting smaller. A team of four with strong AI tooling now ships what took twelve people two years ago, and the org chart has not caught up. The first layer to feel it is middle management - the coordination tier that existed largely to move information between people who were too numerous to talk to each other directly. When the team fits in one room, that layer is overhead.

The conclusion many organisations draw is that leadership itself is what got automated away. That is the wrong read. Smaller teams make more consequential decisions per person, move faster than any review process can keep up with, and have fewer places to hide a bad call. What they need is not someone tracking status. They need direction, judgement about what not to build, and someone accountable for the quality of what the agents produce.

In this talk I will draw on leading engineering teams through this shift to cover what genuinely disappears when teams shrink, what quietly becomes more important, and how to tell the difference before restructuring around the wrong one.