[bdehaaff]

Agreed. The point I am trying to make is the following: I think you need to do both and that's why building great products/software is hard. You need to see the big picture yet deliver against it in bite-sized chunks. Good PMs and Engs are capable of doing both at the same time. That's the key. Give folks responsibility for owning big ideas and allow them to get their work done in an agile, incremental way. Kanban really is about the incremental "getting there" part.