{"slug": "weekly-retro-too-many-layers-too-little-judgment", "title": "[Weekly Retro] Too many layers. Too little judgment.", "summary": "Product managers should focus on developing judgment and AI-steering skills rather than simply increasing the number of PMs to match growing engineering capacity. The real bottleneck is not a lack of PMs but the need to reduce coordination layers and keep the signal-to-outcome cycle short, delegating overhead to AI while retaining human decision-making.", "body_md": "# [Weekly Retro] Too many layers. Too little judgment.\n\n#279 - May.2026\n\n**Weekly Retro**\n\n*is a short e-mail with a wrap-up of ideas from the week, interesting links I found, and food for thought before you head off for the weekend.*Hi there!\n\n💡 Here's a quick idea for the weekend:\n\nMore PMs will not fix the **bottleneck**.\n\nMany people are concluding that, as engineers can deliver more in parallel, the solution is to add more PMs.\n\nThis observation makes sense with I'm seeing today: More delivery capacity = more options to choose from = more decisions that a PM needs to take.\n\nBut I don't think the solution is just increasing the **PM:Engineers ratio**.\n\nIt goes beyond: rethinking **how PMs make decisions** (high judgement over noise) and how they cut the coordination layers between customer needs and what gets built.\n\nEvery coordination step that isn't needed adds complexity, slows the team, and loses clarity.\n\nThis is the one thing PM can develop now: the **taste and AI-steering skil** l to choose over an increasing amount of options, keeping the signal-to-outcome product cycle short.\n\nInstead of delegating the hard judgment calls to AI, delegate the coordination overhead.\n\nLet’s go build something great!\n\n¡Saludos!\n\n### 🎙️ Worth watching\n\nThis clip that started this conversation. Ng argues we should rethink the PM:Engineer ratio. The prescription is debatable. Good food for thought.\n\n### 📖 Good tips for creative work\n\nInteresting framing:\n\n“Claude can't replace taste or imagination, but it can open up new ways of working.”\n\n9 new connectors linking Claude to Adobe Creative Cloud, Blender, Ableton, and others. Tools handle the repetition. Humans owns the judgment.\n\n### 🤔 Article I've been thinking about\n\nCopyright only protects human-authored work. How about AI-generated code?\n\n### 📖 Article I've been thinking about\n\nThis is a bit odd (and scary). Meta is reportedly tracking employee computer activity to generate training data for AI agents.\n\n### 🖋️ Quote of the week\n\n“Good design is as little design as possible.” —Dieter Rams", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/weekly-retro-too-many-layers-too-little-judgment", "canonical_source": "https://www.cesarrg.com/weekly-retro-too-many-layers-too-little-judgment/", "published_at": "2026-05-02 10:15:10+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-05-28 09:13:49.460379+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-products", "ai-tools", "ai-agents", "generative-ai", "ai-startups"], "entities": ["Andrew Ng"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/weekly-retro-too-many-layers-too-little-judgment", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/weekly-retro-too-many-layers-too-little-judgment.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/weekly-retro-too-many-layers-too-little-judgment.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/weekly-retro-too-many-layers-too-little-judgment.jsonld"}}