The Orchestrators Are Gone: How Cutting Program Managers is Paralyzing IT

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The script is now familiar. An IT company faces pressure to cut costs, and the finance department delivers its verdict: a reduction in force. While headlines focus on engineers and developers, a more insidious, less understood cut is happening in the ranks of Program and Product Managers. To the spreadsheet-wielder, these roles look like pure overhead—coordinators who don’t “build” anything. This is a catastrophic misjudgment. By targeting program managers, companies aren’t just trimming fat; they are surgically removing the central nervous system that connects strategy to execution.

The logic of finance is simple, and simply wrong. A Program Manager costs $X in salary. Eliminate the role, and you save $X. What this calculus completely misses is that the Program Manager is the very agent who prevents waste orders of magnitude greater than their salary. They are the force multipliers, the architects of efficiency, and when they are gone, the hidden tax of chaos, misalignment, and stalled projects cripples the organization.

The Program Manager: Not a Cost, but a Savings Engine

When a company indiscriminately lets go of its program managers, it’s not saving money—it’s defaulting on its ability to execute coherently. The real costs explode in the void they leave behind:

  1. The Strategic Drift Tax: A Program Manager’s primary function is to translate high-level business objectives into a coherent, executable roadmap. Without them, engineering teams—now often stretched and demoralized—are left to interpret strategy alone. The result is a portfolio of projects that may be technically sound but are commercially misaligned. Teams build features nobody needs, duplicate efforts, or pursue pet projects that don’t move the business needle. This misalignment is perhaps the single largest source of wasted capital in IT, and it flourishes in the absence of strategic orchestration.
  2. The Velocity Killer: Finance sees a program manager’s salary. They don’t see that person’s role in removing roadblocks, facilitating crucial decisions, and shielding engineers from bureaucratic noise. Without this protective layer, teams grind to a halt. They spend hours in cross-functional meetings with no clear owner, wait weeks for decisions stuck between departments, and drown in administrative overhead. The cost of delayed time-to-market for even a single product can eclipse the annual salary of an entire program management team.
  3. The Communication Breakdown Premium: In complex organizations, the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. The Program Manager is the corpus callosum, ensuring information flows between engineering, marketing, sales, and support. When this role is eliminated, silos solidify. One team builds an API another team can’t use; a sales promise contradicts a platform limitation. The cost of rework, missed opportunities, and internal friction is immense, yet it never appears on a P&L statement as “Cost due to lack of a Program Manager.”
  4. The Institutional “Why” Debt: While engineers hold the “how” (the technical knowledge), Program Managers are the keepers of the “why.” They hold the context behind product decisions, the history of customer feedback, and the business rationale for technical trade-offs. When they are laid off, this institutional wisdom vanishes. New teams spend months rediscovering what was already known, making old mistakes, and rebuilding burned bridges with partners and customers.

The True Savings Lie in Empowering, Not Eliminating

If the goal is genuine efficiency, the focus should be on leveraging Program Managers to identify and eradicate true waste, not making them the first victim of it.

  • Unleash Them on Process Bloat: A skilled Program Manager is your best weapon against inefficient processes. Instead of cutting them, task them with streamlining agile rituals, simplifying reporting, and automating governance. They will find savings that far exceed their cost.
  • Focus on Portfolio Pruning: The biggest savings come from not building the wrong things. Empower your Program Managers to conduct ruthless portfolio prioritization. Killing a single ill-conceived, multi-million dollar project before it consumes resources is the most significant cost-saving action a company can take.
  • Optimize Cross-Functional Spend: Program Managers see the entire value stream. They can identify redundant tools across departments, negotiate consolidated vendor contracts, and align roadmaps to prevent duplicate work. This holistic view is impossible for a siloed engineering team.

The Efficiency Paradox

There is a profound irony in the current trend: the very roles designed to create organizational efficiency and prevent waste are being labeled as wasteful. By cutting Program Managers, finance departments are creating the very chaos and misallocation of resources they purport to solve.

The companies that will thrive are those that recognize this paradox. They will see the Program Manager not as an expendable facilitator but as the critical linchpin holding strategy, execution, and efficiency together. They are the investors who ensure every engineering hour is spent on work that truly matters to the business. In the end, the choice is stark: pay the salary of an orchestrator today, or pay the far greater, hidden tax of chaos tomorrow. The real savings were never in cutting them, but in unleashing their full potential to build a coherent, focused, and truly efficient organization.