Making Engineers Autonomous - Aviv Ben-Yosef

Most leaders struggle to delegate to their senior engineers, yet somehow think they'll be fine with AI writing code autonomously. The real bottleneck isn't the technology - it's your inability to let go. Fixing team autonomy requires attacking the problem from both sides simultaneously: teaching leadership how to delegate properly while building the team's capacity to operate independently.

On the leadership side, stop being an answer machine. If you're spending your days responding to questions like a miserable chatbot, you haven't created the guidelines and defaults your team needs. The micromanagement flywheel teaches us that delegation fails without transparency and trust - and if you can't trust your people, the responsible thing is to not delegate. But that means you need to fix the underlying issues. Would you have hired these people if you knew you'd never trust them? The problem usually isn't the team itself, it's how you've structured communication, clarity, and accountability. Define what ownership means for senior engineers. Be explicit about deadlines and escalation triggers. Build the right safety nets so you can actually let go.

On the team side, you need three things for genuine autonomy: context, objectives, and borders. Context means product mastery - understanding the direction, market, and product well enough to spot shortcuts instead of waiting for instructions at every turn. Objectives must be clear, actionable, and prioritized. Without clarity, people get lost without realizing it. Borders define what the team handles independently versus what needs escalation. This clarity helps engineers know when to stop and ask permission while making management less anxious about letting go. You can't delegate to people who don't know how to do the work, but you also can't expect autonomy from people you're holding on a tight leash.