She told me that there would be no management changes, and she wanted me-- given that I was the most senior engineer-- to give her a plan for fixing things.
I think you should cut her a little slack and take into account her job. You're concentrating on her rational evaluation of your arguments, but that skips right past the hard part of her job. She was still trying to figure out if she could trust your characterization of the facts. Really, if you were her, would you completely reorganize management on the say-so of a single individual before getting a more complete picture?
And if you decided to completely reorganize management, would you tell people about it the instant you made your decision, or would you keep it under your hat until you figured out 1) how to present the decision to the board (or whoever she answered to), 2) how to manage the transition so a bunch of people with institutional knowledge didn't disappear before she could replace them, and 3) how to avoid getting undermined by the people she was plotting against, who may have had significant credibility with the board and with management in other parts of the company?
And if you decided to essentially demote some people by sidelining them in the org chart, would you give one of their subordinates a heads-up before you had a chance to tell them about it?
Finally, it's reasonable to ask you to come up with a solution that differs from the optimal one. You do it in engineering all the time, and management isn't any different. You would say, "Licenses for this software account for 30% of the project budget. Suppose the license fees doubled -- can we design a solution that doesn't use this software?" She might have been thinking, "Gosh, I hope I can get some real development managers in here in three months, but what if it takes a year? I better have a plan for getting products out in the meantime."
I think you should cut her a little slack and take into account her job. You're concentrating on her rational evaluation of your arguments, but that skips right past the hard part of her job. She was still trying to figure out if she could trust your characterization of the facts. Really, if you were her, would you completely reorganize management on the say-so of a single individual before getting a more complete picture?
And if you decided to completely reorganize management, would you tell people about it the instant you made your decision, or would you keep it under your hat until you figured out 1) how to present the decision to the board (or whoever she answered to), 2) how to manage the transition so a bunch of people with institutional knowledge didn't disappear before she could replace them, and 3) how to avoid getting undermined by the people she was plotting against, who may have had significant credibility with the board and with management in other parts of the company?
And if you decided to essentially demote some people by sidelining them in the org chart, would you give one of their subordinates a heads-up before you had a chance to tell them about it?
Finally, it's reasonable to ask you to come up with a solution that differs from the optimal one. You do it in engineering all the time, and management isn't any different. You would say, "Licenses for this software account for 30% of the project budget. Suppose the license fees doubled -- can we design a solution that doesn't use this software?" She might have been thinking, "Gosh, I hope I can get some real development managers in here in three months, but what if it takes a year? I better have a plan for getting products out in the meantime."