When CTO/CPO Thomas inherited Merrill's technology organization, it had no product culture and a best-case release cadence of once per quarter. His diagnosis was that the existing management layer didn't understand — and didn't know how to empower — the people underneath them. Rather than coaching the incumbent managers into a new operating model, he removed the entire existing management layer and rebuilt it from scratch.
Arriving to attempt yet another fix of a long-troubled org carried its own cost: incoming leaders were met with open skepticism — "oh, you're the latest joker who's going to take a whack at this and good luck."
This is a specific, high-cost branch of the more general "right people on/off the bus" transformation principle (see Ingredients of a Product-Model Transformation): when the gap isn't a skill deficit but a foundational absence of product culture and empowerment, coaching up the existing layer may not be a viable path, and replacing it wholesale — while brutal — can be faster and more honest than slow, uncertain remediation. It was the organizational precondition for adopting Org-Architecture Mirroring (Squads ↔ Microservices) and building the product model on a clean slate rather than retrofitting it onto managers who didn't believe in it.
Related: Product Model (vs. Roadmap Model), Ingredients of a Product-Model Transformation.
At Datasite, this technique was suggested by a former consultant brought in during the transformation, framed explicitly as a response to time pressure: with a legacy management layer that didn't understand or empower the underlying talent, and no runway for slow coaching, wiping out and rebuilding leadership from scratch was judged faster than incremental development of existing managers.
Doug (head of sales) describes the scale of the underlying problem: he inherited a sales leader with roughly 90 direct reports and no leaders in between — a flat, unmanaged structure that made incremental coaching impractical and pushed the org toward wholesale replacement rather than gradual restructuring.
At Palace Hotels the broader team was able to adapt to the new product-model way of working, but the original leadership largely could not — confirming a leadership overhaul, not just training, was necessary. Only one member of the original leadership team survived the transition, and that person became the company's first product manager: a case where "replace" and "coach-up" weren't mutually exclusive — one leader was coached into an entirely new role rather than simply retained in their old one.
Из тем: Transformation in Practice