By one's intelligent opinions. You hired them, gauge to the best of your ability if they're doing the job you hired them to do, at a level you deem acceptable. Your boss should measure you the same way.
This makes sense in a small company context when, say, a competent CTO/CEO personally knows everyone and can resolve conflicts, bottlenecks, disfunctions quickly.
But what if a company in question is a relatively big, 1000s of employees, and something is clearly wrong in the org. Both managers and employees are friends, seemingly competent, have all the explanations at hand and all the right excuses.
i don't even think it does make sense for small companies, they can benefit hugely from setting clear, public commitments about what they're working towards
focus is one of the most important characteristics in a startup, because time is too short to waste.
I've seen this direct CTO work scale to a billion-a-year online business with hundreds of engineers :-)
Problems come when a company goes public and now there's no single personal that can accept responsibility for technical commitments. This when a decision-making system has to be put in place, and maybe a way to assess how teams are doing, etc.
Honestly, I think the best you can get is having a competent manager who understands the work and people well and gets the need autonomy and trust from the company. That's hard though and there is no magic wand for the CEO to make all managers "good managers".
Maybe we keep introducing these approaches as an industry because it makes the worst cases less bad, even though it hurts teams and individuals doing well already because ultimately pushing the floor up makes a bigger difference. Not sure if that overall change is objectively better in total or only seems that way because the horrifically bad teams are what catches your attention.
