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Make middle management agents
The Daily Loop
Picture a markdown file and a skill running on a cron at Microsoft, asking how everyone on the team is doing, who is blocked, who they are blocked by, and what the external dependencies are. Suddenly there is a graph and a loop.
Faster Products
Products can then move far faster. A release that would have taken six months could ship in a day or two. An org like Microsoft probably can't do this, but a startup can, and every startup must be organized this way.
Resolving Conflicts
Being in charge is somewhat overstated. The agents can organize the work and resolve the conflicts they can, programmatically and probabilistically, which is a layer that product managers historically filled.
How did middle management begin?
Business historian Alfred Chandler argued in his 1977 book The Visible Hand that American railroads created the first large corps of salaried middle managers. Railroads spanned thousands of miles and ran on strict timetables, so owners could not oversee operations personally. One of the earliest known organization charts was drawn for the Erie Railroad in the 1850s.
How do managers sequence dependent tasks?
The critical path method, developed in the late 1950s by DuPont and Remington Rand, maps tasks and which of them depend on which. The longest chain of dependent tasks sets the shortest possible schedule for a project. Around the same time, the U.S. Navy developed PERT for the Polaris missile program. Both methods treat a project as a graph, with tasks as nodes.
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