The average data team manager is overseeing nearly 3X more people than in 2017. Something has to give.
Gartner’s research on organizational flattening confirms it - spans of control have ballooned while management layers disappeared. But nobody talks about what this does to technical decisions.
A friend working at a mid-sized fintech told me about this recently. Their data lead was managing 14 people across three time zones. Smart person. Good instincts. But every architecture decision was rushed because there was always another meeting, another fire, another stakeholder needing attention.
The result: they picked a data warehouse based on a 30-minute vendor demo. No proof of concept. No cost modeling. Six months later, EUR40K/month cloud bill for a platform that didn’t fit their workload.
That’s not a bad manager. That’s an overwhelmed manager making decisions without the headspace to think them through.
I got this wrong early in my career, by the way. I thought “flat” meant “fast.” It doesn’t. It means the people in the middle absorb all the pressure - and the technical decisions suffer first. They become shock absorbers between leadership’s strategy and engineering’s reality. Every layer you remove doesn’t remove the work. It just compresses it into fewer people.
The fix isn’t re-adding layers. It’s giving your leads protected time for strategic work - even one day a week changes the quality of decisions.
What’s the worst technical decision your team made under time pressure?