The rise of HI-ICs | Elena Verna (Lovable)

I'm going to be talking today about something different. Usually I talk about product-led growth, product-led sales, and how to grow your company. Today I'd like to talk to you about how to grow your career. You're all incredible leaders already in this place, but my career has taken a turn for something different about 8 months ago, and I've been writing about it more and more. And 2 months ago, I nearly got cancelled for writing a post about how our jobs are going to change in the next 12 months. And I wanted to speak a little bit more about how that journey has been for me. I've been a leader at many teams that were mentioned before. I've led hundreds of people in some of those teams. And now I'm an individual contributor at Lovable. And it has been the best career journey that I've ever taken. I want to tell you about why I decided to do it. I want to tell you what needs to be true in organization to do it, and I want to challenge you to think about whether this is the right position for you. So as I said, my name is Elena Verna. I lead growth at Lovable. I've survived at the company for almost a year and a half. It's been amazing. My goal was to make it a year, so I'm like clear sailing at this point. But I've built a growth function at Lovable, then I got fired out of leading that growth function where I became an IC, and we tried the decentralized model that every company has to try with growth. And now we're rebuilding the function, but I'm I'm staying as an IC, so that is being built separately next to me on the side. And most of my time now is not spent in those meetings, cross-functional collaboration hell, and it's actually spent building. And there's something really special about that, especially with so many of us that got to leadership levels because we were so good at our craft, yet The path to graduate to the next level has meant people management. At least that has meant for me, and I've been conditioned so much about it that going back to it has been a really turbulent journey, but very refreshing as well. But let's talk about how our careers have been built in the past and what is changing right now. The ladder was built with an old constraint that more impact that you can have equals more people underneath you. Does anybody feel that that was true? Yeah. So we were all shooting to become a manager. Managing people was important. I still remember, I was doing an interview with Netflix, maybe 15 years ago, and I got rejected out of the process because of how many people I managed in the past. And that one, I love Netflix, I'm a lifelong subscriber, but it sits dearly I'm still resentful to this moment because I don't think, and I've never felt, that impact should be judged by how many people you manage. And especially now that equation is breaking. Because we used to think about it, more reports equals more impact. So you think about IC, manager, director, VP is the career ladder that you had to commit to. But there's only one currency in it, is how many reports do you have. However, right now things are changing and how much you ship how much you can ship, that's how much impact you can drive. So equation is breaking, which is what I use the term of high impact IC, which is high impact individual contributor, but it's not a senior person with no direct reports. I want to be very clear on that. It is the person that is able to find problem, make a decision, execute. This is important. Execute on their own across all of the different functions that require to get to that outcome, ship it, and own the outcome in iterating out of that. That's a whole team's charter, if you think about 5, 10 years ago. Now, any individual can do it all. Because we used to think that the deep expertise and the staff IC role meant a narrow functional focus. And engineers have always had staff ICs. And that was, like, usually architecture-driven. But now IC, it's a deep expertise with broad executional surface and business accountability. So why is this suddenly possible? I apologize in advance, but I actually think of AI as average intelligence. I'm sure it will get into AGI world someday, but for now, it's still super powerful to have at your fingertips an average marketer, an average engineer, an average analyst, an average designer. Honestly, I don't know about you, that's sometimes better than some of the other teams that I had. But it's incredible to like really get to the point where I know what needs to get done and I have this average intelligence intelligence at my fingertips of all of the specialties that I need to have it done. So only 1 or 2 areas of exceptional craft are needed, and then the good enough everywhere else to get it to the point where you can learn. Because remember, everything that we're doing is not because we know what to do and not because we know how good or correct looks like. It's because we need to learn and we need to see our customer feedback and we need to see their reaction in order to understand what the next step is. So before, we had an idea, a meeting, a PM, a designer, a meeting, an engineer, a review, an approval, and a ship. ship. And this is a very shortened process of what it used to be before, because let's face it, there are probably 100 more steps along that line with 3 months, if you're lucky, period of where you can accomplish it versus now you can just have an idea, you can build it, and you can learn. I live in Lovable all day long. We ship to production through Lovable. I create this deck with Lovable. I do all of my ideation with Lovable. I do My calendar, my email, everything management was lovable. Email is probably my worst, but it's OK. When the cost of building falls below the cost of coordinating, the org chart should change. So my question to you is, as we're all talking about this being AI-piled, we're talking about being AI-native, that's only the tooling portion of it. Are you changing your organizational design underneath you in order to take advantage of all of those skills in order to take advantage of the people utilizing those tools. Because if you don't, you're actually not taking advantage of the biggest change that is happening in our system right now. And let me tell you how I became one. As I said, I would love to say that it was very well-crafted and I asked for it. In reality, I got fired out of my job. I didn't get fired out of the company. I got fired out of the responsibilities that I was doing before. And at Lovable, my job has already changed 3 times in the last year and 3 months, and I know it's going to change again. And that's okay, because every single time I do what best contributes to the business and to our customers, and I'm staying flexible, and everybody's job is changing every 3 to 4 months. At Lovable, we have reorgs that are every couple weeks. The only constant is change. Because we're living through the era that some categorize as a similar to industrial revolution. Well, if you're going through that type of change with AI revolution, whatever you want to call it, then you have to adjust to it. Because if you're not changing, that means you're not taking advantage of it or you're not going along with the times. So I got fired out of my management position. I became an IC. And let me tell you just firsthand, that was not an easy path, because so much of my identity was tied to that title and knowing that I'm managing my team. I didn't want it to be related to it, but inadvertently, over the last 2 decades that I've been in the field, it became attached to it. So at the beginning, for about a couple of weeks, I thought, well, did I just get promoted and get the best of both worlds, or did I just lose my status? Did I just lose additional opportunities in the future that I'll have coming towards me? So no team felt like almost like less important until I saw the continuous impact that I can continue doing in the organization. But the decades of conditioning are hard to shake off. I want to acknowledge it because so many of our identities are wrapped up in our titles at work because we spend spend so much time at work compared to doing anything else in our lives that it's actually kind of good to shake it up sometimes. So you don't have such a strong connection to what you're doing, especially in the next year or so, when all of our jobs are going to change. You're not going to lose a position in your company, but what you're doing is going to change. I don't know, how about you, but everything that I'm doing today, day to day, is completely different from versus what I was doing, let's say, 5 years ago or 10 years ago. And I welcome that change. I think it's interesting again, and it's exciting, but it is hard on your identity. And it does take some time to mourn that ladder that you were climbing that you thought was the end goal. But if you realize that at the top of that ladder is not something that is riveting to you, that is not something that you're really, really good at managing large teams and cross-functional collaboration, because you were good at your craft. then maybe this is a better path, and AI can help you continue keeping the influence and the status and even get more impact than potentially you had when you were leading teams. So I used to need a PM, designers, engineers, and a lot of calendar time in order to get things done. Now I build things myself. And I'm responsible for pricing and packaging in our company. So I build and change pricing page, I build prototypes, I deploy to production myself, I do the user research, I do the analysis, I do all of the optimization, optimizations, and then I collaborate with our engineers on some of the bigger model changes that require deeper engineering work. But I'm kind of responsible for it all myself. And there's something so exciting about it. I don't know, how about you all? We all work in tech and we all have these really long outcomes that we're going after. I like, for example, in my spare time, I love power washing. It is so satisfactory, like oddly satisfactory to just like see that clean slate. And to me, this is becoming, and I see it's also so satisfactory because I can see what I'm doing back into customers' hands almost immediately when I'm ready to push it. There's no this cross-functional dependency that is happening. And 90% of my time is either building or thinking about what to build next. It is so exciting. I'm back to my craft roots. And yes, it was exciting to run a team, but being stuck in the meetings all day long and waiting on some team's prioritization in order to get it done, is no more in my day. And by the way, it's so easy to also just fall into the rhythm of being— having your time being stolen away by the meetings that are placed on your calendar versus actually taking time to do what's right for the business and to do what's right for the customer. But you can't just declare people to be high Cs. When I transitioned, I really quickly realized that there are constraints in the system that had to be true in order for me to still feel satisfied in my role and in order for me to still be as impactful as I wanted to be. So high Cs, not just just a job title, it is an organizational operating system. And you need to be careful with that because there's 5 things that I believe that needs to be true on your team in order for you to be able to either transition yourself into an individual contributor role and love it, or in order for you to hire other VPs or chiefs, whatever it is of the titles that people had, as ICs in your team. So I really urge you to look at these. So number one, and this is the most important one, the only way that I can still be impactful is if I have all of the information at my fingertips in order to make the right decision. However, our organizational designs currently gate information by design. You have all of these layers of people filtering information down to individual contributors. Well, that can be no more. You have to trust your people, you have to trust your employees, and you have to flow that information through. Now, obviously, that requires fewer management layers. So at Lovable, we don't have titles. We just have individual contributors. We have leads, and then we have heads of the departments. But there's no managers. There's no directors. There's no such thing as a VP walking into the room and everybody has to listen. Or the highest paid opinion that wins. There's no such thing. Everybody's on the same level with just a higher— just a really high level of who is, if there's an issue, should it ladder up to. In order to scale it, we have agents that live in Slack, and each team has their own agent, and each agent has a mom or a dad or parents that are training that agent. And if you have any questions about that team's, what they're doing, or any documentation that you need, you can just discuss it with an agent. So there's a very important path here of accessibility to information as well. Then the authority has to travel with accountability. If I'm going to be a high C, I'm not going to be OK if I have to travel a decision 5 times up and down in order to get anything done. So team has to trust me. Executive team has to trust me. I actually still sit on the executive team, even though I'm an individual contributor. But I have an ability to decide, to ship, and most importantly, to fail. And guess what? I failed many times at Lovable. From the outside, it might look up, up and to the right, but I've cost Lovable many millions of dollars in my failed experiments. But we've learned such important information out of them that it helped us unlock more growth as a result. But we allow everybody to have meaningful failures that, yes, do impact revenue, and nobody freaks out about it as long as there's learning that can be propagated through. And then the scope isn't defined by function. So I'm not just doing growth. Sometimes I ship core features. Sometimes I get involved in marketing. Sometimes I go do back my growth product stuff. So it's kind of all of it. But remember, one does not simply own it, and it needs 6 approvals. So if it's cheaper to try than to debate, make sure that when experiments are cheap, approval chains are the expensive part. So really think about organizing your team this way, as well as decoupling pay and status from headcount. This one is important. It is so ingrained in us that if we want to get more pay, we have to get promoted to manager, to director, to VP. When I moved When I moved into my IC, I did not have a change in my pay grade. In fact, I believe that if we truly believe into this AI change that is happening in all of our lives, then ICs should get paid more than managers. Because as an IC, you can drive more outcome and impact than the manager in the old system. So otherwise, everybody rationally becomes manager, and there's managers everywhere, and most importantly, there's lots to terrible managers everywhere, because all of us had one through our career. We're not going to name any names, but a lot of those people never wanted to be a manager either. They were pushed into that ladder. And maybe for once, we don't have to do that anymore. And most importantly, I actually ran a survey, and we saw that 42 out of 51 people, managers, actually wanted to go back into IC role. I actually think that I don't know how I can be an effective manager if I don't know how IC work looks anymore. And IC work now looks so different versus what it looked like 5 to 10 years ago. I feel like I need to experience it in order to be an effective manager in the future. So I love to take this opportunity to actually learn what one person could do. So if I am going to lead team in the future, I can direct them appropriately. But money and status has to be equal. And that's important because that's why most of us go into the manager, because we still want to get paid. Let's not forget we're in a capitalism world and we're not doing this for free. And if you want to attract those people, be expected to actually pay them those leadership-level salaries, but do expect leadership-level outcomes out of them as well. Don't ask people to do both. We actually— I've tried to do both manager and IC, and a lot of people say, I love getting back to my IC roots while I'm still running a team. That's a huge context shift that is really difficult to manage. So some people can do it, and I applaud you if you're one of those people. Overall, it's very difficult. You're either a manager or you're an individual contributor. And you can do a lot of context changes in your individual role, and then you can do a lot of context changes in your manager role, but switching between the two, it just becomes nearly impossible. So you have to pick a path. And Really think about scaling through yourself as opposed to scaling through people, because it's a change in mentality of how we do things, and we have to rewire our brains a little bit. But this has been a never more great opportunity in time for you to go back to your craft if craft is what you were great at, if craft was the reason that you got promoted, to where you are right now. Because how silly is it that we take people out of the roles that they're really good at in order to move up the ladder in corporation? And now you can go back and you can still exercise all of the leadership qualities that you've learned and you hard-earned, but doing it as an individual contributor. So I think that AI's most interesting effect on organization is not replacing jobs. No matter how sensational those headlines are and how many impressions they drive for people who just want to make waves. I think it's separating impact from headcount. And I urge you all to think about that for yourself, because right now is the opportunity in time for you to potentially to go back, for you to continue having the impact, for you to love what you do every single day. So take a hard look at your job. Do you really love it? Do you really love how you're spending your day-to-day? Does that give you energy? If yes, keep going. This presentation is not for you. But I've talked to too many people that feel the drain, that don't feel the energy, that don't love where they are. And AI is presenting an incredible opportunity for us. to find the career yet again that gives us that energy. So management needs to be a career path, not a promotion. Thank you all. Thank you.