For most of the last century, there was one reliable way to prove you mattered at a company.
Get promoted into management. Accumulate direct reports. Graduate from doing the work to overseeing the people who do the work. The further you moved from actual execution, the more senior you were considered. This was not a cynical arrangement. It was a rational response to a genuine problem.
The problem was coordination. Knowledge work is inherently fragmented. A product launch requires a designer, an engineer, a marketer, a product manager, someone to handle legal, someone to handle finance, someone to handle distribution. None of these people naturally talk to each other. Left without structure, they produce incoherence.
Management was the solution. Its job was to sit between functions, translate across them, make sure information flowed in the right direction, and de-risk decisions before they were executed. The org chart was not bureaucracy for its own sake. It was a coordination machine — the best one available at the time.
That time is ending.
What the Hierarchy Was Actually Paying For
Here is the thing most people never articulated clearly: companies were not paying managers for their judgment alone. They were paying for the coordination overhead that judgment was embedded in.
A director's salary covered the meetings, the alignment decks, the cross-functional reviews, the back-and-forth between teams, the process of translating a high-level decision into something ten different people with ten different priorities could actually execute on.
The craft — the specific skill that got the person promoted in the first place — became a shrinking fraction of the job. What expanded to fill the space was coordination: approving decisions others would execute, reviewing work others would ship, aligning stakeholders who would otherwise be pulling in different directions.
The manager's value was real. But the premium they commanded was not purely for judgment. It was judgment plus the coordination tax the organization required to function.
AI is collapsing the coordination tax.
The Coordination Collapse
Elena Verna, who runs growth at Lovable and who I have been paying close attention to, recently described how she shipped a prototype of their enterprise pricing page herself. In a previous role, that same project would have required a PM, a designer, and at least two engineers. Multiple rounds of review. A week of calendar time. Stakeholder alignment at each stage.
She did it alone. In hours.
This is not an isolated example. Across the industry, people with senior-level judgment and the right AI toolset are completing projects that previously required entire teams. Not because the work became simpler — but because the coordination cost of that work collapsed.
The gap between idea and execution has narrowed dramatically. When you can prototype, test, and ship in hours rather than weeks, you no longer need the infrastructure that existed to make slow, expensive execution less risky. You do not need five people in a room debating whether to build something when you can just build it and see.
The cost of trying something is now lower than the cost of debating whether to try it.
That changes everything about the organisational structures built around the old cost equation.
The High-Impact Individual Contributor
What emerges from this shift is a new kind of role. Not a traditional IC in the sense of owning one piece of a larger puzzle. Not a manager coordinating others toward an outcome. Something different: a single person who can take a project from problem to production, end to end, with full business judgment at every stage.
The person who can identify that a pricing page is underperforming, understand why, design a better one, build it, ship it, measure the result, and iterate — alone, without approval chains, without passing the baton through five different functions.
Elena calls this the High-Impact IC, which is accurate. I think of it as the practising Business Engineer: someone who combines strategic judgment with executable craft, and who uses AI as infrastructure rather than as a crutch.
The key word is practising. Not theorising. Not analysing. Not producing frameworks that someone else will execute. Actually building the thing.
What makes this possible now and not five years ago is what Ravi Mehta described as "average intelligence." AI can be the average designer, the average marketer, the average front-end engineer. Not exceptional at any of them. But average is enough to get something real out into the world. Average design plus your specific judgment about what the customer needs is often all the situation requires.
You bring the judgment. AI provides the executional surface area. The combination unlocks a level of personal leverage that simply did not exist before.
The Premium Is Migrating
Here is the strategic implication that I think most people are not fully processing yet.
For twenty years, the management path was not just a career choice. It was the only way to earn at the level your skills deserved. You had to move into coordination because coordination was where the leverage was. The premium followed the constraint, and the constraint was coordination.
That constraint is loosening. Which means the premium is migrating.
It is moving back toward craft. Back toward full-stack judgment. Back toward the person who can close the loop between problem and solution without needing an org chart to do it.
The recruiter at Netflix who asked Elena how many people she managed was running a proxy test. He was trying to determine, with a single question, whether she could operate at scope. Headcount was the proxy for scope because scope used to require headcount. That proxy is breaking down. Scope no longer requires headcount in the same way. One person with serious judgment and the right toolset can operate at scope that previously required a team.
This means the old metric is increasingly useless, and the organisations that figure this out first will be able to hire and deploy senior-level talent in ways that legacy competitors cannot match.
What This Means for How You Build Your Career
The instinct most people have — to move into management because that is where the status and the salary are — is not wrong. It is just becoming less automatically true.
There is still a version of management that creates genuine value: the leader who builds team capability, who develops people who would not develop themselves, who creates conditions for others to do their best work. If that is what you love and what you are genuinely good at, nothing in this essay argues against it.
But the version of management that existed purely to service coordination overhead — the layers of middle management whose primary job was to pass information up and down a hierarchy and approve decisions that could have been made lower — that version is under serious structural pressure.
The more interesting question for most people building careers right now is not: should I move into management? It is: how do I become the kind of person who can operate end to end?
That requires a different kind of development than the traditional career ladder encouraged. It requires you to stay close to execution even as you accumulate seniority. To maintain the craft skills that made you promotable in the first place. To resist the pull toward pure coordination and keep one hand on the keyboard.
It requires becoming genuinely multi-functional rather than coordinatively multi-functional. There is a difference between someone who understands enough finance, marketing, product, and engineering to make decisions across all of them — and someone who has just learned to run meetings with people from each function. The former is the Business Engineer. The latter is the coordination premium made human.
The Structural Shift
There is a positive feedback loop at work here that will compound over time.
As the coordination cost falls, fewer coordination layers are needed. As fewer layers are needed, more of the budget flows to the people having direct impact. As more budget flows to direct impact, the best people increasingly choose to stay close to the work rather than moving away from it. As the best people stay close to the work, the quality of execution improves. As execution quality improves, the coordination overhead required falls further.
The organisations that design for this loop — that actively remove the barriers to senior people doing senior work directly rather than through layers of delegation — will build a compounding advantage in the ability to move fast and decide well.
The ones that do not will spend the next decade wondering why their more nimble competitors keep shipping things they take quarters to discuss.
The Craft Premium
The modern career playbook is not: build skills, get promoted into management, hire a team, and grow your headcount until your org justifies your salary.
It is: build judgment that is wide enough to see the whole problem and craft that is specific enough to solve it. Develop the ability to close the loop yourself. Use AI to extend your surface area of execution without losing the quality of your thinking.
Then find the problems large enough to matter and go after them with everything you have.
The title may or may not come. The team may or may not come. What will come, if you do this well, is impact that is legible without a headcount attached to it.
And that, increasingly, is the flex.
Elena Verna's newsletter "IC work is the new career flex" (May 2026) articulates this shift from the inside. Worth reading alongside this if you want the practitioner's perspective.