Lenny RachitskyHost of Lenny's Podcast | Author of Lenny's Newsletter

Why so many VPs of product are quietly missing life as an IC

4 Aug 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:45

This content was created by Lenny Rachitsky. This content was uploaded by Lenny Rachitsky. This is a YouTube video titled "Why so many VPs of product are quietly missing life as an IC" (created 2026-08-04T11:30:10+00:00). The excerpt features a single speaker (labeled SPEAKER A) discussing product-management career trajectories: many former individual contributors who rose to VP/CPO roles miss hands-on product work, find alignment-heavy management roles unfulfilling, and sometimes consider returning to IC work. The speaker mentions recruiting conversations, pitching senior product leaders to be more hands-on, and observes a potential industry bifurcation where organizational size influences whether hands-on work is appropriate. No other participants or Lenny Rachitsky are identified in the excerpt.

Chapters

There's a lot of people that have worked their way up the ladder of product, become a VP, and it doesn't feel exciting to go back to being an IC. How do you feel about that? I think there are probably still a lot of organizations where that is really valuable. My recruiting tends to be the folks who are, oh my God, I used to love product management and I'm so sick of sitting in alignment meetings. And I'm out there pitching CPOs and VPs of product to be like, don't you miss actually doing things? Do you want to come back? It's okay for us to acknowledge that there will be a bifurcation across the industry. I do think that there are organizations that are sufficiently large that maybe everyone being hands-on isn't right. But I've actually found that a lot of the cases, you go and talk to somebody who spent the last 5, 6 years, who spends their entire time in alignment meetings and they miss actually talking to customers and talking to engineers and shipping things.