Every all-hands has a moment where the floor opens up, and a room full of people quietly calculates whether their question is worth the risk of asking it out loud. Most of that calculation is more instinct than judgment. It's worth making it a judgment instead.
A genuinely good all-hands question shares three traits: it's something a meaningful number of other people in the room are also wondering, it can't easily be answered by someone one level down, and it's phrased in a way that invites a real answer rather than putting the CEO on the defensive. Questions that hit all three tend to be remembered well, both by the room, and often by the CEO specifically.
"With the reorg happening next quarter, how should teams think about prioritizing existing roadmaps versus waiting for new direction?"
A specific question about your own team's headcount, a personal career question, or a pointed challenge to a decision that's really a debate you want to have, not an update you're seeking. All three of these are legitimate, just not in front of the whole company.
A good all-hands question represents the room. A question that's really just about you belongs in a smaller room.
The line to watch for is whether your question is actually a shared concern or a personal one wearing a company-wide costume. "How is the reorg going to affect prioritization broadly" is a shared concern. "Is my team going to get cut" is a personal one, real and worth asking, but to your own manager, not the floor of an all-hands.
How you phrase it matters as much as whether you should ask it. A question phrased as a challenge, "why did we even decide to do the reorg this way", puts the CEO in a defensive posture in front of the whole company, which rarely gets you a genuinely useful answer. The same underlying concern, phrased as a request for context, "can you help us understand the reasoning behind the reorg timing", tends to get a much more open, useful response, and doesn't read as a public confrontation.
If you're a first-time manager and genuinely unsure whether your question belongs in that room, a reasonable test is picturing three colleagues nodding along as you ask it. If you can picture that, it's probably a shared question worth asking. If you can only picture yourself needing the answer, save it for a smaller, more direct conversation.