The org chart just lost a few rows

For years the deal was simple. Want more impact? Get more people under you. That math is breaking. AI now lets one skilled person do work that used to need a whole team, and the ladder everyone climbed is losing rungs. Let me catch you up on what changed and what it means for how you build and staff your team.

The manager path stopped being the only path

The old system took people good at their craft and promoted them into a job that had nothing to do with it. Elena Verna lived this. Early in her career a Netflix recruiter's first question was how many people she managed. She had three, they wanted someone running fifteen, and she was cut on the spot. Not output. Not budget. Just headcount.

Now the flex is going back to being an individual contributor. Verna calls it the High-Impact IC: someone with no direct reports who can run a project end to end and still get paid like a leader. She built a prototype of Lovable's enterprise pricing page herself and shipped it to prod. In her old world that needed a PM, a designer, engineers, and a week of calendar time.

The unlock is that AI gives you an average designer, average marketer, and average PM for free. Average plus your own craft is often enough to get a real thing out the door without pulling a team into it first.

Building software got cheap, so more people build it

The same drop in cost is minting new builders outside tech entirely. When Lovable studied who builds on its platform, 80% came from non-technical backgrounds and 55% had more than eleven years of professional experience. Verna calls this Mom-and-Pop SaaS: a recruiter building recruiting software, a soccer coach building soccer software.

This matters for you as a leader even if you never touch a no-code tool. The person closest to the problem can now build the solution, skipping the broken translation layer where a subject expert explains their world to a developer who half-gets it.

And 35% of those builders already make revenue. The point is not that everyone quits to launch a startup. It is that domain expertise now beats technical gatekeeping, and that changes who on your team can ship.

Your systems are the real bottleneck

Most companies already have the tools to move faster. What stops them is structure. Verna is blunt about it: approval cycles, tight role boundaries, title-based hierarchy, and a tier of middle managers whose job is keeping everyone in line. All of it tells employees you don't trust them, stay in your lane.

High-impact ICs only work when they get the same context a senior leader gets. If information gets filtered through gatekeepers on its way down, the model collapses. This is why it clicks at small AI-native companies first. The bureaucracy hasn't formed yet.

Want a cheap test? Verna suggests handing a high-potential junior IC a full-stack project and watching where they get stuck. Wherever they hit a wall is a bottleneck you built.

The flattening is showing up in the hiring data

This is not just one growth exec's theory. Gergely Orosz tracked what he calls management's "great flattening": fewer engineering managers per engineer across the industry, and fewer VP and director of engineering roles at Big Tech.

The title data tells the same story. Frontend-only engineer titles are disappearing fastest, followed by native iOS and Android. Full-stack is the norm, since a proficient frontend person has no reason not to touch the backend too. Specialists who own one narrow slice are getting squeezed toward the edges.

Meanwhile the money follows scarce leverage. At the 80th percentile in the US, $300K base is now normal for senior engineers, and AI engineers pull even higher offers. When one person does more, comp flows to that person, not to the layers that used to coordinate them.

The deep cut

Don't read this as "cut managers." Read it as: the ladder is now optional, and your best people can smell it. Verna warns that your job in two years will not be the job you have today, whether from layoffs or from AI rewriting the work under you. That applies to your team the same way.

So the concrete move is to give your strongest ICs a real path that does not route through people management. Pay them like leaders. Hand them full context and a project end to end. If your only high-comp track requires direct reports, you are about to lose the people who can do a department's work alone, and you will keep the ones who are good at defending a headcount number.

Three questions for your team

1. If you handed your best IC a project end to end with a leader's full context, where would they get stuck first, and is that block a tool problem or a trust problem you built?
2. Does your comp ladder let someone earn like a director without managing people? If not, who are you about to lose because of it?
3. Which roles on your team are narrow specialists in a slice AI now covers, and what would it take to widen them into full end-to-end owners?