No One Does It Alone
What the HI-C trend reveals about broken recognition — and what it hides about management
Elena Verna published a piece this week that is worth reading. She argues that AI is enabling a new class of individual contributors — “High-Impact ICs” — who can complete work that previously required whole teams. She’s living it at Lovable. She shipped an enterprise pricing page alone, in hours, that previously would have pulled in a PM, a designer, and engineers for a week.
She’s not wrong about what’s possible.
But the piece left me with two questions she doesn’t fully answer. And I think those questions reveal something more important than the trend itself.
The flex is the tell
When Elena describes doing it “with just me, myself, and I,” there’s a pride in that framing that’s worth pausing on. Not because she’s wrong. Because of what it says about the system it’s reacting to.
If “I did it alone” is the new career flex, it means “I did it through others” was never the flex it should have been.
For years, the best managers I’ve watched in product organizations were invisible behind their teams’ outputs. The team shipped. The PM or director was the multiplier: setting context, removing blockers, making sure the right people had the right problems. But multipliers rarely get celebrated. They get questioned: ”What do you actually do all day?”
So when Elena says senior leaders are rediscovering their craft by going back to IC work, part of what she’s describing is something real and good. But another part is this: people reclaiming visible credit for contributions that the old system systematically obscured.
That’s not a problem AI solved. That’s a recognition problem we never fixed. And now AI is giving people a way around it.
When we celebrate the soloist, let’s be honest about what we’re really celebrating: not the death of collaboration, but the exhaustion with a system that couldn’t see it.
The Coordination Shadow
Here’s what I want to put a name to: the Coordination Shadow.
Every HI-C casts one. It’s the invisible management work that makes their autonomy possible: the decisions made upstream, before they ever sat down to build.
When Elena ships her pricing page alone at Lovable, here’s the environment that makes that possible:
A small company with a focused, legible mission
Leadership that decided to flatten the org
A culture that trusts employees enough to give them full context
Someone who decided which problems are worth parachuting into
Someone who built the strategy Elena is executing against (maybe she did that on her own, to be fully honest).
That’s coordination. That’s management. It’s not in a reporting line. It’s not in a weekly 1:1, but it’s there — embedded in the decisions that were made before she opened her laptop.
The HI-C trend doesn’t eliminate coordination. It inherits it from somewhere upstream.
The leaner the team, the longer the coordination shadow any one person casts. At Lovable, the founders are carrying a lot of that weight. The HI-C’s autonomy isn’t free: it’s prepaid by whoever holds the mission steady.
The ratio changes. The function doesn’t.
Elena is right that the traditional path — promote your best ICs into management, watch them lose their craft, let them coordinate other people’s coordination — is broken. Fully agree.
But she slides between two different claims without quite separating them:
Management as a career path is broken (True.)
Management as an organizational function is going away. (Different claim entirely.)
When a company has twenty HI-Cs executing end-to-end, someone is still doing this:
Deciding what those twenty people work on
Ensuring they’re not building redundant or conflicting things
Connecting individual work to the company’s direction
Coaching people when they plateau or collide
Navigating the organizational politics when their outputs intersect
That work didn’t move into the AI model. It moved into whoever has the authority, context, and trust to carry it. In a small AI-native company, that’s often the founders. In a larger org, it’s still a manager — just one with a dramatically higher IC-to-manager ratio than before.
The right claim isn’t “managers disappear.” It’s “the manager-to-IC ratio compresses dramatically.”
That’s a big, real change. It’s a better system than the one we have. But it’s a different argument — and an important one to get right, because if we conflate them, we’ll build organizations where the coordination work falls on whoever is least equipped to carry it, precisely because they’re supposed to be doing IC work.
Empowerment vs. isolation
I’m genuinely with Elena on the empowerment argument. If AI lets a PM run an experiment that previously needed an engineer, a data analyst, and three weeks of coordination — that’s amazing. That’s good for the PM, good for the company, good for the speed of learning.
But there’s a distinction worth protecting:
Empowerment says: You can do more than you thought. Use the tools. Push further. Expand what’s possible for you.
Isolation says: You don’t need anyone. The solo output is the proof of value.
The first is healthy. The second not as much.
The most effective senior people I’ve seen in product aren’t celebrated because they did things alone. They’re celebrated because they made the people around them capable of things they couldn’t do before. That’s still the highest-leverage thing a senior person can do — not because it’s virtuous, but because it’s how organizations get smarter over time instead of just faster in the short term.
AI raises the floor on individual output. It doesn’t change what excellent leadership looks like at the ceiling.
So what’s actually changing?
The old system: promote ICs into management → they lose the craft → they coordinate other people’s coordination → they become invisible multipliers whose value no one can articulate.
The system Elena is describing: keep ICs in their craft → compress coordination layers → reward direct output → make contribution visible.
That’s better. I want that world.
But it’s not a world without management. It’s a world where the management work is more distributed, less visible, and — if we’re not careful — more likely to be absorbed silently by the people with the most context and authority, while everyone else celebrates their autonomy.
The HI-C is real.
The invisible conductor making the HI-C’s autonomy possible is also real.
Celebrating one while pretending the other doesn’t exist isn’t a new org model. It’s just a new way of not seeing the work that holds everything together.
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