[lowenbjer]

I've been a CTO and founder several times. The bottleneck was never "getting the work done." It was always translating between the business reality (runway, revenue, growth, what customers actually want to pay for) and what the team needs to hear to build the right thing. That translation layer is hard, time consuming, and easy to get wrong.

I know plenty of founders who are great engineers, product thinkers, and salespeople. They still hire people to manage teams because there are not enough hours in the day to do it all themselves, even if they could.

If you're the person who understands the business, understands the customer, and can turn that into clear direction for the people building the product, whether those are humans or AI agents, you will be hard to replace. That's not project management as "status updates and Jira grooming." That's a fundamentally different and more valuable skill.