THE VERDICT: a real decision, graded.
The decision: In early 2025, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told the company's senior leaders to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of Q1 2025. His stated reason: too many management layers had built what he called 'pre-meetings for the pre-meetings for the decision meetings,' a structure where it had become genuinely unclear who owned a decision at all.
My verdict: Jassy was solving the same problem as the owner in the story above, just at Amazon's scale. He didn't say the fix was hiring more managers to manage the confusion. He said the fix was fewer layers and clearer ownership.
Why most people are reading it wrong: The headlines treated this as a layoffs story, cut costs by removing management jobs. But Jassy's own language points somewhere else. He said the goal was to 'clarify and invigorate their sense of ownership' and 'drive decision-making closer to the front lines.' That's a role-design story wearing a layoffs headline.
Your version: You don't have management layers to flatten. You may not have management layers at all yet. But the underlying question is identical to the one Jassy asked at well over a million employees: does everyone on this team know exactly what they own, and exactly who decides what when there's a disagreement? If the honest answer is no, that question comes before your next job posting, not after it.
How to tell if you need a hire or a role redesign
Run this before you write another job description. It takes less time than a single round of interviews.
1. Name the friction precisely. Is it a capacity problem, not enough hours in the day, or a clarity problem, nobody's sure who owns what? Most owners assume capacity. It's usually clarity.
2. Map decision rights before you map job duties. For every recurring decision on your team, whose call is it, and does everyone actually agree on that answer? If two people would give you two different names, that's your real problem, and a new hire won't settle it either.
3. Give every existing role one measurable outcome, not a list of tasks. 'Handles customer support' is a task list. 'Owns resolution time under 24 hours' is an outcome someone can actually be held to.
4. Build the feedback loop before you build the headcount. People do a job better and faster when they get direct, regular signal on whether they're doing it right. That loop costs nothing to build, and most teams have never had one.
5. Only hire once the redesigned role survives two weeks without a body in it. If the friction disappears once ownership and decision rights are clear, and the only thing left missing is capacity, that's a real hire. If the friction is still there, hiring will just relocate it to a new person.
THIS WEEK'S MOVE
Pick the one role on your team causing the most friction right now. Before you post a job for it, write down who owns the outcome and who makes the call when there's a disagreement. If you can't answer both questions clearly, that's the fix. It isn't the hire.
Best,
Micah
THE BROWN BOX
The Brown Box is out now, and Realign Staff and Roles is chapter seven of the TURNAROUND method for exactly this reason. Hiring feels like progress because headcount is a number you can point to. Role clarity doesn't show up on a spreadsheet the same way, so it's the fix most owners skip, right up until it's the reason they can't stop hiring. That's the chapter that walks through how to fix the role before you fix the roster.
Grab your copy → https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H2X4Z85W
Already read it? A two-line review does more for this book than almost anything else you could do for me. Hit reply once it's up, I read every one.