In a departure from her usual topics of product-led growth and sales, Elena Verna, who leads growth at Lovable, shared her personal journey and insights into growing one's career, particularly in the context of emerging technologies like AI. She opened by reflecting on a recent experience where a post she wrote about jobs changing in the next 12 months nearly got her "cancelled," underscoring the controversial nature of her views.
Verna, who has previously led hundreds of people in various leadership roles, has recently transitioned into an individual contributor (IC) role at Lovable. She described this as "the best career journey" she's ever taken, driven by a desire to return to "building" rather than being bogged down by "cross-functional collaboration hell" and endless meetings. Her journey at Lovable saw her building a growth function, then being "fired" from leading it to become an IC when the company experimented with a decentralized growth model. While the function is now being rebuilt, Verna is committed to remaining an IC.
She challenged the traditional career ladder, built on the "old constraint that more impact... equals more people underneath you." Verna recounted a Netflix interview 15 years ago where she was rejected due to the number of people she managed, an experience that still fuels her resentment towards the idea that impact should be judged by headcount. She argued that the equation "more reports equals more impact" is breaking, replaced by "how much you ship, how much you can ship, that's how much impact you can drive."
This new paradigm defines a "high-impact IC" not merely as a senior person without direct reports, but as someone who can "find problem, make a decision, execute... across all of the different functions... ship it, and own the outcome." This was once a team's charter, but an individual can now achieve it. While staff IC roles historically involved narrow functional expertise (like engineering architects), Verna sees the new IC as having "deep expertise with broad executional surface and business accountability."
The sudden feasibility of this model, she explained, is due to AI. Verna controversially termed AI as "average intelligence," but highlighted its power in providing access to an "average marketer, an average engineer, an average analyst, an average designer." This allows an IC to possess one or two areas of exceptional craft, with "good enough everywhere else" to build and learn quickly. The traditional process of Idea -> Meeting -> PM -> Designer -> Meeting -> Engineer -> Review -> Approval -> Ship (taking months) is now streamlined to Idea -> Build -> Learn. When "the cost of building falls below the cost of coordinating," the organizational chart must change, Verna asserted.
Her own transition to an IC role was not by choice; she was "fired out of my job" as a manager. This was initially turbulent, as much of her identity was tied to her management title. She grappled with questions of promotion versus loss of status. However, she found continuous impact, despite the decades of conditioning that link status to management. She emphasized that all jobs are changing, and that embracing this change, even if it means "mourning that ladder" that was once the end goal, can lead to a more fulfilling career rooted in one's craft.
Verna now builds things herself, taking responsibility for pricing and packaging at Lovable. She changes pricing pages, builds prototypes, deploys to production, conducts user research, and performs analysis, collaborating with engineers only for deeper work. This immediate feedback loop of "power washing" satisfaction, where she can see her work directly impacting customers, is profoundly rewarding. 90% of her time is spent building or strategizing, freeing her from endless meetings.
For organizations to successfully enable high-impact ICs, Verna outlined five critical conditions:
1. **Information Accessibility:** All information must be at ICs' fingertips, requiring fewer management layers and trust in employees. Lovable, for example, has no traditional managers or VPs, using Slack agents for information.
2. **Authority with Accountability:** ICs must have the authority to decide, ship, and fail. Verna still sits on the executive team and is empowered to make decisions, even if they result in "meaningful failures" that cost millions, as long as learning occurs.
3. **Scope Isn't Defined by Function:** ICs should have broad responsibilities, not confined to a single domain (e.g., Verna does growth, core features, marketing).
4. **Cheap to Try, Expensive to Debate:** Experiments should be cheap, and approval chains should be minimized to facilitate rapid iteration.
5. **Decouple Pay and Status from Headcount:** Verna argued that ICs should ideally be paid more than managers, as they can drive greater impact. She noted that 42 out of 51 managers in a survey wanted to return to IC roles, suggesting that many were pushed into management rather than choosing it. She stressed that one cannot effectively do both IC and management simultaneously due to the extreme context shifting.
Verna concluded by stating that AI's most interesting effect is "separating impact from headcount," not merely replacing jobs. She urged leaders to consider this organizational shift, providing an opportunity for individuals to return to their craft, leverage hard-earned leadership qualities, and find energy in their day-to-day work. "Management needs to be a career path, not a promotion," she asserted, challenging her audience to reconsider their career paths and organizational designs.