Main idea

A developer equipped with a code agent doesn't merely write their lines faster: they produce more options, more variants, more prototypes, more small internal tools, more initiatives. A team whose delivery capacity used to be bounded starts generating far more things to test, review, arbitrate and prioritize.

The capacity to decide, meanwhile, doesn't grow at the same rate. If everything still goes through the Product Manager — prioritization, product coherence, customer signal validation, market trade-offs, managing consequences — then they become the system's saturation point. The organization believes it has solved a speed problem because the developers are delivering more; all it has done is move the blockage from one post to another.

Three responses exist, and they aren't equivalent. Hiring more Product Managers adds a layer of arbitration without changing the model. Automating the operational part of the role — documentation, release notes, launch materials, translations, screenshots — frees up hours without touching the question. Redistributing part of the product ownership to those who build is the only one that attacks the cause, and it is the one that blurs the roles.

Why it matters

This gives a test to apply before equipping a team: where will the queue go when production has doubled? A throughput gain upstream of a single decision point turns into waiting, not into value.

And it explains why some heavily tooled teams experience the acceleration as a degradation: work arrives faster at a post whose capacity hasn't changed, and the congestion becomes visible there as delays and unsettled subjects.

Nuances and limits

The shift isn't mechanical. A team whose decision-making is already distributed — because the developers arbitrate part of their own perimeter — absorbs the increase without saturating anyone.

And the saturation can come from somewhere other than decision-making: support, deployment or the market's capacity to absorb new releases can become the hard point before the Product Manager does.

Open questions

• By what signal does a team recognize that its queue has moved onto decision-making, before delays expose it?