Even the best manager is faced with a bandwidth problem. It's impossible to collect accurately everything that the engineers are doing. And each layer of management is applying its own compression on what information they get from the levels below.
What is frustrating when having the feet on the ground (or in the code), is that we clearly see the issues on our level. But conveying that in a understandable and nuanced manner would require too much context.
IMO a good solution is to leave breathing room in the agenda and trust that the engineers will work on fixing those issues. By making them somewhat autonomous they can skip the politics and get right down to make their lives and the product a better place.
A complementary phrasing is to apply the subsidiarity principle ("the principle that a central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed at a more local level" – OED) to companies, which would be the antithesis of micro-management. When your boss is an enabler first and a decision maker second, they are already following a variation of that principle.
I wish there was a standard way to work against the institutionalized trust issues that creep up in larger companies. E.g. when managers can only take actions if they can show an issue exists using their (arbitrary) metrics, and not when their reports directly tell them about it.
What is frustrating when having the feet on the ground (or in the code), is that we clearly see the issues on our level. But conveying that in a understandable and nuanced manner would require too much context.
IMO a good solution is to leave breathing room in the agenda and trust that the engineers will work on fixing those issues. By making them somewhat autonomous they can skip the politics and get right down to make their lives and the product a better place.