I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve watched organizations bet everything on structure. New reporting lines. Shiny titles. Boxes and arrows in a deck that promise alignment.
And yet, when systems creak under load or a release train derails, those diagrams are silent. It’s not titles that bring clarity. It’s not org charts that patch outages. It’s people.
And the people who matter most aren’t necessarily the ones at the top of those charts. They’re the ones who act like managers of one.
I first came across the phrase in Basecamp’s classic essay Hire Managers of One. It was simple but profound: the most valuable people are those who don’t wait to be told what to do. They take ownership, create clarity, and move the work forward without constant direction.
I’ve seen this play out for 15+ years in the industry. Teams with a few managers of one scale effortlessly, even in chaos. Teams without them? They stagnate, no matter how pretty the org chart looks.
These are my reflections on why managers of one matter, how to recognize them, how to nurture them, and how not to bury them under process.
🔗The Engineer Who Saved an Outage
It was one of those nights every engineer dreads. Peak traffic window. Customers piling in. And suddenly everything ground to a halt.
The war room filled instantly. Dozens of people dialed in, Slack channels exploding with speculation. Managers whispered about escalation paths. Leaders debated messaging. Everyone was waiting for someone else to make the first move.And in that noisy paralysis, one engineer went quiet.
While the room buzzed, she traced logs, replayed requests, and spotted the failure point. She didn’t wait for consensus. She posted two possible fixes with trade-offs, chose the one that would stop the bleeding fastest, and deployed.Twenty minutes later, the status page turned green. The outage was over before most people had moved past introductions in the war room.
Leadership didn’t announce the fix. They didn’t even notice who did it until much later. The customers saw stability. The team saw relief.That’s a manager of one. Not reckless, not freelancing — decisive, outcome-focused, and willing to carry ownership when everyone else froze.
🔗What Does It Mean to Be a Manager of One?
At its core, a manager of one does three things exceptionally well: • Frames problems. They turn ambiguity into clear next steps. • Decides what matters. They prioritize without waiting for a manager to assign tasks. • Delivers outcomes. Not just closed tickets, but real impact.
An early-career engineer might be told: “Implement the logging library.” A task-driven person writes code. A manager of one reframes it: “What failure modes does this help detect? Should we add metrics too? Can this be reusable across services?”
The distinction isn’t technical brilliance — it’s posture. They manage themselves the way a manager would manage a team.
🔗Why Titles and Org Charts Aren’t Enough
Org charts are necessary — they clarify accountability and reporting. But too often they become a substitute for leadership.
Titles get treated as proxies for impact. Hierarchy gets mistaken for progress. The assumption is that if you “get the boxes right,” outcomes will follow.
But diagrams don’t build systems. People do. And specifically, people who don’t sit idle waiting for authority to cascade downward.
A team full of managers of one can absorb ambiguity, recover faster from setbacks, and scale outcomes no matter what the chart looks like. A team without them becomes fragile. Bottlenecks multiply. Leaders drown in micromanagement.
The healthiest organizations don’t just hire titles. They multiply managers of one.
🔗What Happens When They’re Trapped in Org Structures
Many organizations say they want initiative, but then trap it in structures designed for compliance.
The organizational impact
- Autonomy gets crushed under process. Instead of solving problems, people waste cycles filling JIRA tickets no one reads.
- Decision velocity slows. Alignment becomes an endless calendar exercise. Standups devolve into status theater.
- Outcomes give way to optics. Success is measured in velocity points and dashboards, not working systems.
The personal impact:
- Frustration builds. For someone wired for ownership, “just follow the process” feels like punishment.
- Initiative erodes. Why push for clarity if bureaucracy wins every argument?
- Retention risk skyrockets. These people don’t quit because the work is hard — they quit because the work is trivialized.
I’ve seen engineers drained by release processes so brittle that shipping anything became harder than tolerating the pain. I’ve seen architects told to prepare pages of documentation instead of solving outages. I’ve seen standups that measured airtime instead of outcomes.
When you take managers of one and force them into machines optimized for appearances, you don’t just waste them, you actively teach them that initiative isn’t welcome.
🔗Why Engineers and Architects Should Care
Becoming a manager of one is the fastest way to build credibility and autonomy — whether you’re writing your first lines of code or designing cross-org systems.
- Early-career engineers: Start small. Don’t just close tickets. Think about testing, deployment, and user impact.
- Mid-level engineers: Spot recurring problems. Drive systemic fixes instead of tolerating pain.
- Tech leads: Create clarity for your team when leadership is still debating alignment.
- Architects: Don’t retreat into boundaries of ownership. Validate designs under real load. Embed with teams. Model how to balance long-term integrity with short-term delivery.
The people who thrive in this industry aren’t the ones waiting for permission. They’re the ones asking: “What’s the right thing to do next — for the system, the team, and the org?”
🔗Why Managers Should Care
For engineering managers, managers of one are force multipliers.
Instead of orchestrating every move, you gain teammates who:
- Spot problems before you do.
- Frame trade-offs instead of dumping raw problems.
- Reduce dependency on constant top-down direction.
Meetings shift from “What should we do?” to “Here’s what we propose.” That shift alone is transformative.
But managers also have to create the conditions for autonomy. Too much direction suffocates it. Too little context turns it into chaos. Coaching matters.
🔗When Structure Enables Autonomy
Sometimes you need process to create space for initiative.Think of guardrails on a highway. Without them, speed is dangerous. With them, you can drive faster and safer.
Good constraints — clear ownership, service-level objectives, lightweight incident playbooks — increase autonomy. They reduce uncertainty so people can act without fear.
The trick is finding the minimum viable structure. Enough to provide safety and alignment. Not so much that it smothers initiative.
🔗Building managers of one
Managers of one aren’t born. They’re developed.
- Early career: Start with safe-to-fail experiments. Own small recurring pains. Reframe one ticket into a broader outcome.
- Mid-level: Encourage system ownership. Have them lead a postmortem or redesign a brittle process.
- Architects+: Expect them to mentor others into autonomy. Influence beyond their team.
Coaching techniques for managers:
- Ask: “What do you think we should do?” before giving answers.
- Recognize problem reframing, not just problem solving.
- Protect autonomy by killing ceremonies that exist only for optics.
Autonomy compounds. The more you model and reward it, the more it spreads.
🔗When Initiative Conflicts
What happens when two managers of one disagree? Or when autonomy starts pulling teams in different directions?
This is where experienced technologists matter most. Their job isn’t to crush autonomy with top-down mandates — it’s to provide alignment frameworks.
- Shared principles instead of rigid rules.
- Cross-team forums where trade-offs are debated transparently.
- Lightweight standards that create coherence without stifling initiative.
Think APIs for teams. Each team owns itself, but the interfaces align. That’s how you scale autonomy without chaos.
🔗Pitfalls of Becoming a Manager of One
Self-management is powerful but messy. I’ve seen talented people stumble into these traps:
- The Lone Wolf — autonomy confused with isolation. → Share progress early and often.
- The Hero Syndrome — trying to own everything yourself. → Scale by enabling, not hoarding.
- The Checklist Mentality — mistaking tickets for outcomes. → Focus on impact, not motion.
- The Premature Rebel — bypassing standards “for speed.” → Balance freedom with responsibility.
- The Overthinker — waiting for perfect clarity. → Bias for action; ship at 80%.
- The Invisible Impact — doing great work nobody sees. → Narrate your impact so others can align.
Recognizing these traps is half the battle. Correcting them builds credibility.
🔗How This Shapes Culture
When managers of one are nurtured, culture transforms:
- Leaders stop micromanaging.
- Teams move faster.
- Engineers and architects feel trusted.
- Technical debt shrinks as people fix issues instead of waiting for permission.
Velocity becomes a byproduct, not something squeezed from process.
That’s when org charts stop being the blueprint for how work gets done — and culture takes over.
🔗How to Spot and Support managers of one
Spot them by:
- Watching who reframes problems instead of just solving assigned tasks.
- Noticing who proposes next steps unprompted.
- Seeing who others go to for clarity — even without a title.
Support them by:
- Giving them context, not checklists.
- Including them properly without they feel being left out
- Killing ceremonies that exist only for optics.
- Recognizing outcomes, not ticket counts.
- Protecting their energy from bureaucracy.
For HR and people ops:
- Interview for autonomy. Ask candidates about times they reframed ambiguous problems.
- Promotion criteria. Reward clarity, ownership, and influence — not just code volume.
- Performance reviews. Highlight outcomes, not compliance.
The most important step? Don’t just praise them. Multiply them. Model their behavior. Make it the cultural baseline.
Being a manager of one isn’t a title. It’s a posture.
- For engineers, it’s the fastest path to growth.
- For architects, it’s how vision stays grounded in reality.
- For managers, it’s the secret to scalable teams.
- For founders, it’s the foundation of resilience.
Org charts will always exist. But culture isn’t drawn in PowerPoint. It’s built in daily behaviors.
What shapes culture isn’t the number of managers on the chart, but the number of managers of one in practice.