Ah! Josh, your name was familiar to some of my coworkers!
A couple of points to answer your questions:
- We do centralize our product strategy and portfolio planning, but we decentralize our release and iteration planning.
- We focus on building strong teams of diverse talent sets that are becoming more self managing. Teamwork is big for us, flying solo on any task is rare-r than in other places I've worked.
- Our management (and everyone else) are really accessible for a medium sized company. I have faith that if I sent a calendar invite to our C*O for a 15 min chat on a free timeslot, they'd show up. Of course, respect goes both ways and I wouldn't book their time unless I really needed them specifically and it couldn't be handled asynchronously.
