AI is amplifying tech’s favorite competitive sport: who can work the most. Now, having a ‘996’ culture (working 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week) is starting to be worn as a badge of honor. Like you’re not taking it seriously if you’re putting in 70 hour weeks.

I’m not buying it.

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There’s a big difference between working hard with working all the time.

And I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one: I keep having the same conversation with super talented people who are excited about AI but hesitant to join AI companies because they have kids. And I get it. Tech has always had a hustle-bro problem, but the AI era seems to have taken it to another level. So what, the price of building a generational company is not having time to raise the next generation??? whut? That’s a pretty ridiculous tradeoff to expect people to make.

Look, I have absolutely nothing against people who want to work 996. I’ve had those phases in my own career. If that’s what you want to do with your time, go for it. More power to you. But let’s not confuse the willingness to work insane hours with ambition, commitment, and even talent. Please don’t do that.

And the irony is that this is happening in the very industry that’s supposed to be making all of us oh so very much more productive.

So I think we need to have a more nuanced conversation about what sustainable ambition actually looks like. Because the choice shouldn’t be between having major impact at work and having a life outside of work. Avoiding 996 should not disqualify anyone from participating in the AI revolution.

996 is not a competitive advantage.

There’s something so ironic about the AI industry’s obsession with extreme working hours. We’re building technology that can automate entire categories of work and make small teams capable of accomplishing what previously took entire organizations. Yet somehow, the humans building all this are expected to work more hours than ever.

Make it make sense.

Of course, I understand the dynamics. AI is one of the biggest technological opportunities of our lifetime. The competitive window feels compressed, and every company is racing to capture as much of the value as possible. When your competitors can ship in days what used to take months, you feel an enormous amount of pressure to move faster. I experience that pressure every single day.

But I keep seeing this: Every time technology makes us more productive, we simply raise our expectations. A project that used to take 6 months now takes 6 weeks? Amazing! Let’s do 10 of them! And maybe another 5, because surely our competitors are doing 15.

So AI might eliminate a lot of work, but I’m starting to doubt that it will eliminate much working.

So for all these companies doing 996 by default… is that actually building a competitive advantage or just getting ahead by convincing the employees to borrow from their future selves?

Think about it. You’re getting more output today by consuming someone’s future health, relationships, and capacity to perform. The company captures the short-term upside, while employees eventually pay the interest through burnout, deteriorating health, and missed life they can’t get back. And unlike financial debt, this particular liability doesn’t show up on anyone’s balance sheet. Convenient.

I’m not arguing that working more than 40 hours is bad or that everyone should clock out at 5pm sharp. There absolutely will be and should be intense sprints to finish something and get the job done against a deadline. Sometimes there are launches, emergencies, or opportunities that actually deserve everything you’ve got. But there’s a difference between sprinting when you really need to and designing an org where everyone is expected to sprint all the time, forever.

If your company can only win by requiring everyone to work 996, maybe the problem isn’t that your employees lack ambition. Maybe your company hasn’t figured out how to prioritize.

We’re filtering out the exact people we need

There’s another problem with normalizing 996: You’re telling a massive portion of the workforce that they need not apply. Parents are an obvious example, but the same is true for people caring for family members, people with health constraints, or frankly anyone who has built a life they actually enjoy outside of work.

That is a terrible business strategy.

Your product is going to reflect the perspectives of the people who build it. If you make it practically impossible for anyone with significant responsibilities outside work to join your company, you’re totally narrowing the range of human experiences represented on your team. You’re also excluding a lot of experienced people who have already made the mistakes you’re inevitably headed toward.

I actually think having constraints outside work makes you a better operator.

When you know you need to leave at 5:30 or your kid will be stranded at soccer practice, you get real good at identifying meetings that do not need to happen. You have to delegate or deprioritize. When there’s a hard line on your schedule, you develop a clearer understanding of what’s really important and what just feels urgent because someone senior is stressed about something unrelated.

Which doesn’t mean that being a parent automatically makes you more productive or that people without kids are somehow worse at prioritization. But having constraints forces a level of discipline that unlimited availability does not. If you’re gonna be in the office until midnight anyway, why not explore that random detour?

I’m living this

I work at Lovable, easily the fastest-moving company I’ve ever been part of. And I’ve worked at some pretty intense companies. The pace is insane, expectations are high, and the sheer volume of opportunities can be overwhelming. Some of my colleagues are absolutely doing 996, possibly even 997.

And I love working here. I’m learning and working on problems I really care about, and surrounded by incredibly talented people. But I generally don’t work nights or weekends.

Those nights and weekends are when I’m a mom. That time is blocked on my calendar, along with my mandatory gym time, which is also non-negotiable if anyone wants to interact with a reasonably pleasant version of me. I want to cook dinner, take my kids to their sports, help with homework, or just... gasp... read a book.

And even with Lovable’s unreal growth rate, those boundaries have been respected.

But I also recognize that I’m in a privileged position. I’ve spent years building my career, I have credibility, and I’m comfortable saying no. Someone earlier in their career, trying to establish themselves in a hypercompetitive environment, might not feel nearly as empowered to make the same choices.

That’s why I don’t think the answer can be to just tell employees to set better boundaries. Companies have to create a culture where those boundaries are actually respected, and where people aren’t somehow penalized for having them.

The actual test of a company’s commitment to sustainable working practices isn’t whether the top execs can leave early to pick up their kids. It’s whether junior employees feel they can do the same without sacrificing their careers.

Still, no matter how supportive your company is, I think there’s an uncomfortable truth we all need to acknowledge:

Nobody is going to protect your time but you

A company’s incentives and yours are never going to be perfectly aligned. Its job is to grow, compete, and create value. And especially in AI, where it feels like the opportunity is moving at light speed, none of the companies want to voluntarily slow down.

Sure, companies offer unlimited vacation, flexible schedules, wellness stipends, and all sorts of lovely benefits. But when the next big launch is 3 weeks away and everyone is freaking out, nobody is going to appear at your desk and gently suggest that perhaps you should spend more time with your family.

If you’re willing to give your company 12 hours, I promise someone will find 12 hours of problems for you to solve. If you’re willing to give 16, congratulations! We’ve discovered 4 additional hours of problems! And somehow there’s still going to be an enormous backlog of things that didn’t get done.

The demands never stop. So at some point, you have to decide how much of yourself you’re willing to give.

This is where a lot of people, myself included, get into trouble. It’s so easy to develop a codependent relationship with your job. You keep overriding your own boundaries because the work is important, your teammates need you, and you care so much about the outcome. Eventually, you become resentful because the company never seems satisfied. Then you leave for another job, hoping the next one will somehow respect your time more.

But unless you change your own behavior, there’s a good chance you’ll recreate the exact same situation.

I’ve learned this the hard way. And I’ve developed a few principles that help me manage it.

1. Stop trying to achieve work-life balance

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I hate the term ‘work-life balance.’ It makes it sound like we’re supposed to maintain some perfectly calibrated 50/50 split between work and everything else. 8 hours of work, 8 hours of life, and 8 hours of sleep. Every day. Forever. As if we’re somehow not alive while working, but that’s a separate philosophical discussion.

That’s not how life works. And frankly, it’s not how I want my life to work.

There are periods when work is going to take up more of your time. When I start a new job, I’m usually completely consumed by it for the first month or two. I’m learning, building relationships, trying to understand the business, and figuring out where I can have the biggest impact. That’s not a great time to pick up a new hobby or insist that every week looks exactly the same.

There are also phases when something outside work deserves more of your attention. Your kids need you, you’re dealing with something personal, or maybe you’ve simply spent the last few months running at full speed and need some time to recharge.

I’ve learned that my own energy comes in waves. Some weeks I’m completely all in. Other weeks I intentionally slow things down, spend more time with my kids, and give my brain a chance to recover. For example, public speaking drains me. After a stretch of events and travel, my poor introverted brain feels like someone left 40 browser tabs open and then tried to run a software update where something fails to shut down. If I don’t give myself some downtime, I become so much less effective at everything.

So instead of trying to maintain perfect balance every day, just recognize what season you’re in, make deliberate choices about your priorities, and avoid letting a temporary sprint become your permanent way of life.

2. Use the 5-year regret test

This is probably the single most useful exercise I’ve developed for managing competing priorities.

A while back, I noticed a pattern. I’d make a decision that seemed completely reasonable in the moment, only to regret it later. And almost always, the regret came from missing something with my kids, not from missing something at work.

I think the reason is pretty simple: Work is real good at manufacturing urgency. There are deadlines, problems to solve, smart people who have a lot invested in the outcome, and usually some kind of reward for being the person who steps up. Say yes to work, and you’ll be celebrated. Maybe even paid more! Meanwhile, family can always wait until later.

Except, it can’t.

So now, when I’m really torn between a work commitment and something personal, I try to mentally remove myself from the immediate situation and ask: Which decision am I more likely to regret 5 years from now?

Sometimes the answer is absolutely that I’d regret missing work!

There have been times when I’ve said no to my kids because a professional opportunity mattered so me. I love what I do, and I want my kids to see what it looks like to be passionate about your work and really commit to something you believe in.

But way more often, this test helps me say no to work without feeling nearly as guilty.

What I struggle with is the idea of compounding regret. Every time you choose something that feels urgent over something you know matters more, you add another small regret to the pile. And eventually, you might look back and realize you’ve spent years prioritizing things you barely remember over experiences you can never recreate.

The funny thing is, most work emergencies stop feeling like emergencies the moment you physically leave the meeting. Somehow the universe keeps functioning. Shocking, I know.

3. Say your boundaries out loud

One thing I’ve learned is that people are generally terrible at respecting boundaries they don’t know exist. Yet so many of us are secretly hoping our employers will somehow figure out what we need.

I try to be very explicit. I tell people when I’m available, when I’m not, and what my non-negotiables are. I don’t pretend that taking my kids to soccer is some mysterious ‘strategic planning’ block on my calendar. I tell people I’m taking my kids to soccer.

We have to normalize this level of transparency, especially as leaders.

A lot of people avoid setting boundaries because they’re afraid of falling behind. What if everyone else is working late? What if the person who’s always online gets promoted? What if saying no makes people question whether you’re committed enough?

Unfortunately, those fears exist for a reason. Plenty of companies do reward availability over impact, even if they claim otherwise. But that’s the tradeoff you have to examine for yourself.

And I’m glad that the AI era is giving us an interesting opportunity to rethink how we measure contribution. Now even an IC (especially a HI-C) can ship prototypes, build features, run campaigns, and produce high-impact work on their own. If output is becoming more visible and measurable, shouldn’t we be getting less obsessed with how many hours someone spends staring at Slack?

I’d much rather be judged on what I accomplish than how often my status bubble is green. And I’d encourage anyone working in AI to push for the same.

Leaders, you’re part of the problem. And the solution.

Sorry, but a leader telling their team, ‘Remember that work-life balance is important!!’ is not enough. What matters is what the leader actually does, themselves.

You can tell your employees to take vacation. You can insist that they should log off at a reasonable hour and spend time with their families. You can publish the most beautiful employee wellness policy known to humanity. But if you’re sending Slack messages at midnight, responding to emails throughout your vacation, and proudly announcing that you’ve worked every weekend for the past 3 months, guess what your team is going to believe?

I’ve seen leaders fall into this trap even with the best of intentions. They think they’re protecting their teams by absorbing all the extra work themselves. And sometimes they are. But more often, they’re unintentionally setting the standard everyone else feels obligated to match.

People pay attention to what gets rewarded, not just what gets said.

If the employees who get promoted are consistently the ones who are always available, then you have a culture that rewards constant availability. If someone delivers exceptional work but gets labeled ‘not committed enough’ because they leave at 5:30, then your flexible work policy is essentially just recruiting copy.

Leaders, it’s time to take more responsibility for this.

Take vacations and actually disconnect. Tell people you’re picking up your kids instead of hiding it behind a ‘focus time’ calendar block. Stop treating every problem like an emergency. Reward people who get exceptional results efficiently, not just the ones who spend the most hours visibly working.

If you’re going to miss your goals if people take the weekend off, you’ve got a pretty fragile organization.

And if you’re wondering why your best people keep burning out after a year or two, maybe don’t immediately assume the solution is to hire people who are even more willing to sacrifice their personal lives.

The future of work is still a choice

I’m pretty sure AI isn’t going to magically give us more free time. In fact, I’m guessing it might do the opposite. As the technology expands what’s possible, our ambitions and expectations will expand right along with it. There will always be more to build, more to ship, and more opportunities to chase.

And I’m not against any of that. I love ambition. I love working with people who are obsessed with what they’re building. I love being part of an industry that’s moving faster than anything I’ve experienced in my career.

But I’m not gonna accept that participating in this revolution requires sacrificing everything else.

If you’re a parent who’s excited about AI but worried about the culture, I wouldn’t write off the industry. We need more experienced people with different perspectives and responsibilities building these products, not fewer. But I’d be very deliberate about choosing where you work, understanding what you’re signing up for, and being upfront about your non-negotiables.

And if you’re leading an AI company, I challenge you to think about whether you’re actually creating a high-performance organization or simply one where people compete to see who can work the longest.

Because here’s the thing: We get to decide what we do with all the productivity AI creates.

We can use it to build extraordinary companies while giving people more agency over their time. Or we can use it to make the hamster wheel spin even faster, while congratulating ourselves on how productive we’ve become.

Personally, I’m going to keep building, keep pushing, and keep obsessing over growth problems that probably don’t deserve quite as much of my attention as I give them.

But I’m not doing 996.

Edited by Jonathan Yagel.

I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of my career obsessing over pricing and packaging and most importantly I work for an AI company, so I assumed I could figure this out. Turns out, I have vastly overestimated my qualifications.

Some companies promise 5x more usage without explaining 5x of WHAT. Others give you hundreds of millions of tokens, which sounds generous until you realize you have no idea what a token buys you. Some have decided that having a pricing page is optional.

Just imagine interviewing someone who tells you they’ll cost 500 million tokens a week, or that for twice the salary they’ll do “5x more work,” without telling you how much work they do today. Funny, right? In AI, we call that a pricing page.

And here’s the fascinating part: these companies are WILDLY successful. Millions of users, eye-watering valuations, explosive growth. Apparently, understanding what you’re paying for is no longer a prerequisite for buying software.

Before anyone accuses me of throwing stones from my very glass house, I lead growth at Lovable, and we have the same problem. We sell credits for a product that can build websites, apps, internal tools, presentations, and whatever else someone dreams up tomorrow. Good luck wrapping that into three subscription tiers.

But maybe we’re not all just terrible at pricing. AI products can do almost anything, and the cost of doing it can vary wildly. Unlike traditional SaaS, where we could reasonably charge for seats, storage, or transactions, we’re now trying to price work that neither the customer nor the company can reliably predict.

So far, the industry is getting away with it because the products are just that good and new and exciting. But will that last? Early adopters will tolerate mystery credits and surprise usage limits. The mass market? I’m less convinced.

Let’s examine a few:

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GrokBot

One of the very hyped products out there right now, giving all kinds of people all kinds of agents. So, how do they do pricing?

This starts out pretty simple - 4 plans. Easy! But… what’s the actual amount of AI usage are you getting? Grok has somehow built an entire pricing strategy around multiplying a number they refuse to tell you.

Premium gets 4x more usage than Plus. Super gets 15x more. Except nowhere does it explain how much usage Plus actually includes. So we’re multiplying an unknown number by increasingly impressive numbers and calling it pricing.

Muse

Muse is on fire right now and has a pretty amusing approach to pricing: just don’t have a pricing page in logged out state at all. I searched everywhere and the closest thing I found was a Facebook Answers post. Apparently, pricing is now a community-sourced mystery.

They do have pricing in-app: $20/month for 500 MILLION tokens per week.

Half a billion! Of something! I have no idea what that buys me, but I’m pretty sure I’m supposed to be impressed.

P.S. Extra credit for charging on monthly frequency, but giving tokens on the weekly basis.

Lovable

I’m not sparing my own company either… we have this issue, too:

So, we give you credits… but what does that mean? $25/mo gives you 100 Pro credits, but no one knows what that means until you start building and see it for yourself. I’d love nothing more than to tie our pricing to outcomes, whether that’s hosting, a take rate on GMV (hi, Shopify!), or something else entirely. But ideally, we’d still be in business by the time you get there (and right now we wouldn’t).

Instinct

So hot right now. This is their site.

Which brings us to the fact that if your AI product is awesome right now, you don’t need pricing figured out to get a ton of users. You don’t even need a proper marketing website. You can just launch, go viral, and worry about all those pesky things we used to consider prerequisites for running a legitimate company later. What a time to be alive. Anyway, moving on.

11Labs

Their pricing is similar to Lovable’s: credits! Except they give you WAY more of them. Because why give someone 100 imaginary dollars when you can give them 10,000? Welcome to arcade economics, where the money is made up and the numbers are designed to impress.

But wait.. there is more! a LOT more.

It is flexible alright. Human brain is not evolved enough to be able to comprehend this many plan options and decision making dimensions.

ChatGPT

Now let’s talk about what the big boys and girls are up to:

Four plans for individuals. The Free plan’s feature list is basically just “Limited” copy-pasted all the way down. The first paid plan (‘Go’) offers a highly quantitative increase of ‘More’ across 4 of the elements.

The Plus and Pro plans pretty much just choose a different adjective and copy-paste down the line: Either taking your ‘Limited’ or ‘More’ access and then leveling it up to ‘Expanded’ or ‘Maximum.’

Anthropic

Perhaps it’s more clear from their frenemies over at Anthropic?

At least the Free tier isn’t so blatantly framed as a second-class citizen. But… yeah, when I pay for Pro I get… ‘More usage’! More than… what? There’s that helpful little * there… that doesn’t actually connect to anything below. And Max is 5x or 20x more usage. That sure is a lot more than whatever it’s a lot more than!

So what on earth do we do about this?

I think there are four things happening simultaneously, and they’re making an already complicated problem considerably worse.

1. We’ve invented arcade money for AI

Let’s start with something we’ve been doing in pricing for decades: making money feel less like money. There’s a concept in behavioral economics called mental accounting, which helps explain why people treat different forms of money differently. It’s why casinos have chips, arcades have tokens, and every other mobile game seems to have its own imaginary currency that somehow requires you to buy 1,200 gems to purchase something that costs 950.

AI companies have enthusiastically adopted this approach. Instead of dollars, we give people credits, tokens, compute units, and whatever other imaginary currency our pricing teams come up with. And yes, these currencies can make it harder to understand what you’re actually spending. When you’re using 12 credits instead of $3, you might be less inclined to think about the real cost.

But here’s where I have to defend the industry, including Lovable. Credits aren’t necessarily a sinister monetization scheme. They can solve a real problem. When your product has multiple AI models, tools, and actions that each have different underlying costs, a common currency makes it possible to package them into something resembling a subscription. Otherwise, we’d essentially be asking customers to manage a miniature AWS bill every time they wanted to accomplish something.

The problem isn’t necessarily that we invented these currencies. It’s that we’ve done a bad job explaining what they’re worth. If I give someone 100 Lovable credits, I should be able to help them understand roughly what they can accomplish with them. Otherwise, I’m not really selling them 100 units of value. I’m selling them 100 units of mystery. But this is incredibly hard when you have AI doing something custom for every customer!

2. We’ve confused bigger numbers with more value

Once you invent a currency, you can make the numbers as big as you want. Why give someone 100 credits when you could give them 10,000? Or 500 million tokens? Bigger numbers create an impression of generosity :)

And notice how much of AI pricing is framed around quantities rather than value. More tokens. More credits. Maximum messages. Extended access.

Nobody wakes up wanting 500 million tokens (sorry Muse). They wake up wanting to get something done. But we have no idea what our products can even do for our customers, since AI leaves it so open ended. So we are stuck once again.

3. We don’t know what unit we charge for anymore

This is where the problem gets genuinely interesting. Traditional SaaS had its own pricing problems, but at least we generally had some reasonably understandable ways to measure consumption. You could charge per seat, per transaction, per gigabyte of storage, or per API call. These weren’t perfect measures of customer value, but they were usually predictable enough that someone could estimate what they needed before buying.

AI has made that considerably more complicated. What exactly is the unit of consumption for an agent that can research your competitors, create a marketing campaign, build an application, or handle your customer support? Is it the number of messages you send? The number of tasks it completes? The time it spends working? The number of times it calls another tool? And more importantly, which of those measurements would actually make sense to the customer?

Some products have it easier. ElevenLabs can charge by minutes of generated audio or agent calls. Firecrawl can translate credits into pages scraped or searches performed. Those units aren’t perfect, but at least they’re connected to something a customer can imagine needing.

But the more general-purpose the product becomes, the harder this gets. An agent that can do almost anything doesn’t have one obvious unit of value. If we charge by the hour, customers might wonder why they’re paying more for a slow agent. If we charge by the task, how do we distinguish between answering an email and building an entire application? And if we charge for successful outcomes, who decides what success means?

The irony is that we’re building increasingly sophisticated AI systems capable of doing work we couldn’t have imagined automating a few years ago, and then asking customers to estimate how many tokens they’ll need to use them.

It’s like selling someone a car and asking them to estimate how many times the engine will fire… whut.

4. We don’t even know what it will cost us

And here’s the part that makes this genuinely difficult for AI companies. We aren’t just struggling to predict what customers will do with our products. We’re also struggling to predict what those actions will cost us.

In traditional SaaS, serving another customer wasn’t free, but the marginal cost was often relatively low and predictable. You could offer a subscription with generous usage allowances and have a pretty reasonable idea of the economics. AI changes that equation because every additional interaction can carry a meaningful inference cost, and different interactions can consume vastly different amounts of resources. (This goes away if LLMs become basically free… but we are not there yet).

This is especially challenging with agents, because they’re not just responding to a single request. They can plan, execute multiple steps, call tools, make mistakes, retry, and decide that the task requires a completely different approach. Two customers might ask for essentially the same outcome, but the underlying work (and cost) could be dramatically different.

(P.S. And then there’s also FRAUD. Bots, stolen accounts, and people abusing free tiers. In traditional SaaS, a fake signup mostly messed up your conversion metrics. In AI, it ruins your bottom line. So now we have to predict not just what customers will use, but how creatively people will try to bankrupt us. Fun times!)

This is why I think the answer isn’t as simple as “just charge for outcomes.” I love outcome-based pricing in theory. It aligns the company’s success with the customer’s success, which is what pricing should ideally do. But it’s considerably harder to implement when the same outcome can have wildly different delivery costs, when outcomes are difficult to define, or when the customer and the AI company disagree about whether the job was successfully completed.

Sorry, customers. We’re working on it.

I don’t have a magical answer to AI pricing, which is somewhat disappointing given how many years I’ve spent thinking about monetization. But I do think this is going to become one of the most important problems AI companies need to solve as the technology moves beyond early adopters.

Right now, we’re surrounded by people who are willing to tolerate a ridiculous amount of complexity to use these products (Hi there, you AI pioneer! Yes, I’m talking to YOU). They’ll compare tokens, look up credit consumption, calculate model costs, and accept that their usage limits might change tomorrow. But those people aren’t the entire market. They’re the people who are enthusiastic enough about AI to put up with things most customers would find completely unacceptable.

If we want AI to reach a much broader audience, we can’t expect everyone to become an expert in inference economics just to figure out which subscription to buy. We have to make the cost of accomplishing something understandable, reasonably predictable, and within the customer’s control.

I think whoever figures this out first will have a massive competitive advantage. Not necessarily the company with the cheapest AI, the smartest model, or the most generous allocation of imaginary credits. But the company that can make AI pricing understandable, predictable, and aligned with customer value, without bankrupting itself in the process.

We’ve spent the last few years racing to make AI more powerful. The next big race might just be figuring out how to charge for it. And honestly, I’m not sure which is harder.

Edited by Jonathan Yagel.

That’s why I’m a big fan of operator-creators.

That’s definitely been my approach. (You can read the full story here if you want: So you want to be a content creator?) Even though my content and advising work is self-sustaining, I keep taking full-time jobs. That’s one of the reasons I’m guessing lovely people like you keep giving me your precious attention by reading stuff I write: because it’s based on what I’ve actually done.

So I’ve got no plans to give either of these sides of my life up. For the most part, they actually make each other better: my day job makes my content much more interesting and relevant and credible. Writing things out forces me to take the stuff floating around in my brain and turn it into frameworks that I can share with other people. And having my own audience is an immediate win for any company where I work …

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I’ve worked and/or advised a lot of tech companies at this point (I think I’m becoming a pipeline for Bending Spoons acquisitions). Big ones, small ones, public ones, hypergrowth ones, slow ones, and everything in between.

But I’m also very much a millennial of the previous tech era. Most of my instincts about how companies are supposed to work were formed before AI: managers manage, people have clearly defined jobs, important decisions happen in meetings, information travels through org charts, and becoming more senior generally means managing more people.

And after more than a year at Lovable, I keep running into things that violate those instincts.

This is the first company I’ve worked at that I would describe as AI-native. And to be clear, I have exactly one data point here, so this is not a manifesto for how AI-native companies should work. I’m not even sure which parts are AI-native, which parts are Swedish, and which parts are just Lovable being L…

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But most do not. Instead, they’ve got… a pricing page. They’ve got a spreadsheet. They’ve got 14 Slack threads (each with different participants) arguing about whether some new feature should be in Free or Pro. Some even have the privilege of storing a 97-slide pricing research deck from Simon-Kucher Price that no one has ever actually read (Can I do a rant about SKP? Yes I can, but I shouldn’t… Not here.)

This has always created problems but it’s about to become a much bigger one, with every software company shipping faster and faster. Not only can engineers code faster, but growth/marketing teams are getting in on the fun, and if your CEO hasn’t yet added something to the roadmap that they vibe-coded over the weekend, they will!

So if everyone is shipping more product, we’re also gonna have more monetization decisions. Every new feature comes with the same questions: Is …

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Watching companies go through the same PLG-to-enterprise growing pains over and over again makes me feel like I’m Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. I’m not really seeing this at Lovable and I will do everything in my power so that it will continue this way, but as I talk to other companies, it is always a painful reminder how wide-spread this is…

So this post isn’t really about the solutions. Okay, yeah, obviously I have strong opinions about how we can fix some of this stuff. But for now sometimes it’s helpful to just realize you’re not the only one having these discussions. The good news for you is… your problems aren’t so unique. Not such great news for our industry, though.

So I made a bingo card of my um, favorite conv…

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Yep, Lovable is a PLG company. Most of our revenue comes in self-serve. We also have an amazing sales team, but our main motion is still very bottom-up. Prosumers, founders, people building personal projects, and a surprisingly large number of people using Lovable inside companies are still just swiping their credit card.

And yeah, we’re an AI product, so every time someone uses Lovable, it costs us actual money. But a huge part of our growth strategy is still based on giving the product away for free.

I know. Somewhere, a finance person just felt a disturbance in the force. Because AI made everyone panic about gross margin, and in response a bunch of companies are hiding the exact thing customers need to experience before they’ll pay.

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So I decided to dig a bit deeper. I ran a study!

Some of my favorite highlights:

• Yep, people want to do IC work: 71% of people (including managers!) want at least half of their time to be spent on IC work. 27% said they only want to do IC work.

• Manager-turned-ICs wouldn’t trade it for anything: 75%+ of this group said they wouldn’t trade roles with anyone in the org. (vs. ~30% of current managers.)

• The IC cost is… influence: Yep, 32% mentioned comp. But 66% of people said the main downside of being an IC is lack of influence.

But the numbers themselves weren’t the main thing. This was not just a quick-click survey. I teamed up with the Typeform team to try out their new Research Flow product to do a full-on panel of AI-moderated interviews.

We ended up getting 300+ people to talk through their career experience, their perspective, and what matters to them. And then used The Power of almighty AI to analyze and make sense of a huge amount of qual data, very quickly.

In this post, I’m going to focus on the experiences of a few particular groups of responses: people who have already made the jump from manager back to IC, plus those who are in management and considering making the swap. And then a group I didn’t really think about at first: the ‘player coaches’ who say they’re currently working as a manager AND as an IC.

Why did they do it? Do they regret it? What roles do they most envy in their orgs? Let’s find out.

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There’s a lot here, so feel free to skip to the parts you find most interesting:

• Part 1: Key findings

• Part 2: Former-manager ICs are ‘getting their life back’

• Part 3: Player Coaches love it or hate it.

• Part 4: IC-leaning managers are trapped by golden handcuffs.

• Part 5: How to build High-impact ICs (HI-Cs)

Part 1: Key Findings

What type of work do most people want to do? The assumption I’ve seen for my whole career is that people want to be managers and do management work. But if you strip out the perks of management, we found that this isn’t the case:

#1 - Most people want to do IC work - even managers.

Q8: If compensation, title, and prestige were identical, which role would you choose?

That’s right: The largest group (27%) want to stay 100% focused on IC work. 71% want at least half their time to be spent on IC tasks! Out of 320 respondents, only 35 want to do all management, all the time. (And of those 35: 31 are current managers or player-coaches! Only 4 ICs in the whole study would choose to do 100% management.)

The interest in IC work holds up even when we filter for those currently in management roles:

Q8: If compensation, title, and prestige were identical, which role would you choose?
(Filtered by ‘I’m currently a manager and want to stay in management’ and ‘I’m currently a manager and have considered returning to IC work.’)

The largest group (24%) want to be 100% IC, and 57% want at least half of their time to be spent as an IC. Only 25 out of 128 managers would choose to do 100% management work.

#2 - Perks of management? Mentoring, Influence, Comp.

When we asked about the main benefits of management, the top answer was coaching and mentorship. But influence and comp were close behind.

Q9: What do you think is the main benefit of being in a management role? It’s okay if you have not been in this type of role, just share your beliefs. Select your top choice.

The top answer was growing others through coaching/mentorship (29%), closely followed by having greater influence over decisions/strategy (26%) and higher comp (24%).

#3 - Downsides of being a manager?

When asked about the downsides…

Q10: What do you think is the biggest downside of being in a management role? It’s okay if you have not been in this type of role, just share your beliefs about this type of role. Select your top choice.

Just FYI: We allowed multiple-choice for the ‘downside’ questions - which is why you get more than 100%

Not too surprising: Mostly focused on too much time in meetings (27%), less time for hands-on work (25%), and navigating politics (23%). Responsibility for other people’s careers (19%) and outcomes (17%)

Managers also hated meetings (27%). But it was interesting that ICs with no management experience (both those who want to stay IC and those interested in management) significantly overestimated how much politics and loss of hands-on work would bother current managers. These ICs picked ‘navigating organizational politics’ at 32%, which was almost double what actual managers picked (16%).

This was even more dramatic for ‘less time for hands-on work’: this was the top perceived downside of management for ICs (39% of them selected this!), but only 19% of the actual managers mentioned this.

#4 - Upside of being an IC? More time to do hands-on work they enjoy.

People were surprisingly consistent with the main thing they liked about IC work:

Q11: What do you think is the main benefit of being an individual contributor (IC)? Select your top choice.

That was true across current managers, ICs, and player coaches. Although player coaches actually said that ‘Having a direct impact through my own work’ was almost as high! (23% vs. 24%)

#5 - Downside of being an IC? Influence > Money

When looking at the cost of staying IC, comp was the top response (32%). But… ‘Fewer opportunities to influence company strategy’ was close behind (30%)

And when you consider all of the closely-related responses, Influence is clearly the most common factor: ‘Fewer opportunities to influence company strategy’ + ‘Less influence over organizational decisions’ + ‘Less opportunity to shape the direction of a team or company’ + ‘Limited ownership outside my area of expertise’... altogether, you get 66% of respondents saying that organization influence is the main downside of staying IC!

Q12: What do you think are the biggest downsides of being an individual contributor (IC)? Select your top choice.

Managers were similar: 34% said comp was the biggest issue. 63% chose one of the influence-focused categories! And 31% of Player Coaches said comp, with 55% indicating some type of influence.

Want to run your own studies with Research Flow?
Schedule a demo with the Typeform crew.

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Part 2: Former-manager ICs are ‘getting their life back’

This is the group I was most interested in. When I originally wrote that ‘IC work is the new career flex’ article, this is the group I was thinking about. So, it was cool to hear the real stories of 22 people who have gone through it.

‘I’ve never had more fun in 20+ years…’

One participant’s story really stood out to me:

‘About two years ago, I was laid off from a role as director of product and started a consulting firm, initially to offer product strategy consulting to early stage companies. In the summer of 2025, I did a lot of exploration with vibe coding tools and pivoted my business to focus more on helping early stage companies quickly validate their ideas with MVPs built via AI. That led to a consulting engagement helping an established company build a proof of concept, and then I came on full time, as an individual contributor vibe coder. I report to the CPO but my days are spent building and enhancing and stabilizing the application. And I’ve never had more fun in 20+ years of my career.’

Turning a layoff into a solopreneur strategy? I love it. Plus, jumping into vibecoding and using that to step into IC work is amazing. The study agent followed up to ask for more details: ‘What is it about doing the building yourself now that feels more fun than being a director?’

‘I think it’s a couple of things. One, first, as a director-level product leader, I had, you know, my days were mostly meetings. And I rarely had any time to feel like I actually delivered anything myself. Whereas in my current role, I am the cycle from ideation to definition to implementation takes you know, minutes to hours, maybe days. At the most. And I love the sense of actually building and delivering something of value multiple times a day.’

His comments about his quality of life sounded very very familiar:

‘So the interesting thing is I have more job satisfaction and less professional frustration than I’ve had in years of product leadership. So in that sense, it makes my work life balance and my quality of life much better. But on the flip side, I am having too much fun. I think it’s largely driven by my enjoyment, and I am working too much. Which pulls my quality of life holistically down a little bit. So from just a purely job satisfaction and satisfaction in general, I would say, uh, very much improved. From a work-life balance perspective, it’s slightly improved. I’m probably working longer hours, but the time that I’m not working, I’m happier, and I’m more present.’

When your main downside is that you’re having too much fun at work, so that it’s affecting your work-life balance, that’s usually a good thing.

Thoughts on ‘getting their life back’

That particular story wasn’t unique. Throughout almost every single one of the responses in this group, the managers who returned to IC work described a similar life upgrade:

• Sr IC, Engineering (Berlin): ‘I noticed the level of energy. Before, I felt rather like a routine type of day. Now I sleep well. And I’m quite creative. I started a side project, open source, and interestingly I now have two investor calls next week.’

• Sr IC, Design (Austria): ‘I’m in my forties. I have a family. I don’t need to put all of myself in my work.’

• Director, HR (Bay Area): ‘I have more time to spend with my family. I have more time to focus on one or two projects and deliver quality and depth.’

• Sr IC, Research (Michigan): ‘When my workday is done, my workday is done. I don’t need to be attentive to emails or DMs from my direct reports.’

I’m not saying that switching back to IC is all rainbows and unicorns. One former manager swapped to a senior product IC role because the pay was just too good, but ended up regretting it:

‘[It’s] a bit of buyer’s remorse. You know, look, the grass looks greener on the other side. As soon as I made the jump back into an IC role, the roles and responsibilities in the day to day, I miss being a manager.’

They envy… no one!?

The other thing that really surprised me about this group was their responses to the open ‘Whose role do you envy in the company’ question. Most of them said… nobody! Seriously. Check out their answers:

• ‘No. I don’t envy anyone else in the business. I really enjoy what I do, and I suppose I’m in a very fortunate position that I can span many areas of the business and get involved in any area.’

• ‘I don’t know that I really envy anyone’s role. [Before, in my previous role…] I was envious of teams that were able to ship faster than my team was able to, and I moved myself. To a position where I could ship more quickly. And so would say at the moment, I’m enjoying the things that I’m learning in my role and not particularly looking at another role with envy.’

• ‘Honestly, I don’t really envy any other roles. I really like my role. I like it the best of any role.’

• ‘Nobody. I think when I was managing people, I had team sizes of up to 20, 25. It was actually a role that I’m doing now that I envied. I envied people who could just kind of come in with their laptop, grab a desk, just get on with their day and not get disturbed. … But when you’re running a team, you really can’t do that. You have to be there and present. So, yeah, I did envy those people, but it’s something that I can do now, which is nice.’

• ‘I’m thinking about this. I’m not sure. Oh, okay. I think probably the people who do ops. No. Maybe maybe the program managers. No. I don’t know. I don’t know that there’s anyone whose job I really want. Happy in my job.’

• ‘No one. I think.’ [Follow-up: That’s interesting. What makes you feel that way—does your current role already have most of what you want?] ‘Exactly. My current role is the one that I would dream about.’

They just keep going. I was going to paste in all 16 of them, but I think you get the idea.

Out of the handful of people who chose another role in their company, one person said their CEO (he admired how much he could get done) and one said Director of Product (because the respondent had been demoted, and that was the role he would have had). Other than that, the only other responses that didn’t say ‘no one’ were just senior-level ICs in other functions.

Looking at the other job situations, this level of contentment in their role was definitely not normal. Analyzing the free-response questions is a bit tricky, but here’s a rough breakdown:

% of each group that responded to open-ended Q6: ‘Who at your company has the role you most envy?’ with ‘No one’ or ‘Nobody.’

That’s right: Over 70% of all managers and ICs considering management had a specific role they envied. A bit over half of player coaches had a role they envied. And again, this is up against the former-managers-now-IC group, where only 1 in 4 were envious of someone else’s role! These people seem super content.

Part 3: Player Coaches love it or hate it.

The first big thing about this group is how many of them there are! 29% of all respondents fell into the ‘I’m currently doing both manager AND IC work’ category, which I call the player coaches.

The other thing that stood out to me is that this group was the most divided: On one hand, there are people who love the balance. But on the other hand, people who are forced into doing both are stretched thin and miserable.

Best of both worlds? If you choose it.

The Player Coaches overwhelmingly indicated that they wanted to stay in the 50/50 split between management and IC work:

Q8: If compensation, title, and prestige were identical, which role would you choose?
(Filtered by ‘I’m currently working as a manager AND as an individual contributor.’)

The majority of this group clearly wants to keep doing what they’re doing. And a lot of the comments from these Player Coaches mentioned how happy they are:

• Head of Ops (California): ‘I find a lot of fulfillment in mentoring and helping grow and direct, unblock individuals. And then I also really need to solve problems and puzzles and figure things out and have novel work. I think just doing one of the tracts would be too boring, but by doing both, I get to contribute directly and help others succeed.’

• Director, Marketing (London): ‘I get a lot of fulfillment in just seeing people in the team thrive. And knowing that I have a small part to play in their success. But I also need that time without constant interruptions to actually shape the strategy myself.’

• Manager, Financial Services (Reading, UK): ‘I’m in two roles. I’m managing a team, plus I’m also working as an individual contributor. Which in itself is a very big high for me. There is no one else’s role I would like to take at this moment. I’m happy.’

• Manager, Product (Vancouver): ‘I found a really nice niche role for myself because it is that blend of IC and management work in an area that is very exciting, but not under the executive super-pressure.’

• Head of Marketing (Scandinavia): ‘I chose a hybrid role to stay close to floor work and keep up with what is happening. Having managed 12 direct reports before and now just 1, my quality of life is much better.’

• Director, Community/Product (Kansas City): ‘I actually think I have the best job in the company. I’m not sure I would want somebody else’s job right now. I think a lot of people actually might want mine.’

Unfortunately, this wasn’t everyone. The biggest trend I saw is that people like this role… when they choose it. But a lot of the people who were forced into this role were miserable.

‘I literally have a pain in my neck because of the anxiety…’

One PM described his experience with this situation:

‘It’s a unique situation for the company. I used to manage people. With organizational changes, … the company doesn’t have an opportunity to open two roles. Because of the budget, they pay me once. And it worked fine. So it’s not really the same as say, Elena experienced, when she’s moved back to the IC role. … In my case, it’s because of the budget and because of the company’s weird structure.’

He said it’s been pretty brutal:

‘I’m working a lot, around, ten to twelve hours a day. Obviously, deprioritized some of the main functions of the day. So let’s say, I deprioritized sports, the way I eat, sometimes the way I sleep. So I always have been a workaholic, so I never have stuck to work-life balance. However, if I’m not trying to keep it in balance, like, it’s sort hard … Just super hard to stay sane. And most importantly, not only working a lot, but also, the constant stress. So, literally, I do have a real pain in my neck because I’m constantly having anxiety on the things that we should deliver.’

Being stretched too thin

This showed up in a lot of the stories:

• Director, Design (Miami): ‘I find myself constantly trying to reach a state of coherence, not just for my team, but also for myself. I’m just mentally exhausted at the end of the day.’

• Director, Marketing (London): ‘What I’m expected to deliver as a people leader and as a high-impact IC — that all works great. What has impacted my quality of life is the whiplash… coaching the team through reorgs while having less bandwidth.’

• Head of Ops (California): ‘It’s hard to relay clarity, direction, and guidance when I don’t have it myself.’

• Sr IC, Customer Success (Canada): ‘With my tier ones and twos always escalating to me, I don’t get a lot of uninterrupted time to just focus and try to solve problems. When I don’t get the things I enjoy doing at work, that makes me like my job a lot less.’

• Head of Product (Belfast): ‘I do leave some time to spend with my toddler, but it’s back doing essential tasks late at night. Little time for gym, football, and other things I enjoy. [And it’s also hard] seeing the team implement features end to end and grow an area, while I am stuck in management meetings.’

• Sr IC, Customer Success (Canada): ‘I envy the people who have already left [the company]. Because they were able to translate the work that we do here into less stressful positions.’

And one of the former-managers, a senior IC researcher from Canada, said it clearly, too: ‘Trying to do both is next to impossible. Management doesn’t scale proportionally.’

For a lot of these people, it seems like becoming a player coach is the result of an org that doesn’t have the discipline or clarity to give a particular lane. So they’re forced to do two jobs (or more) and expected to maintain what feels like an impossible standard of being excellent at both.

Part 4: IC-leaning managers are trapped by golden handcuffs.

When looking at the managers, I particularly wanted to dig into the group considering making this jump - managers who ‘have considered returning to IC work.‘

Managers considering IC are money motivated…

The most interesting stat to me: it seems 80%+ are stuck because of the money. Of the 51 managers who have considered going back to IC, 42 say they’d actually do it if money and status were equal. And 26 of those said 100% IC, another 16 said mostly IC. Only 2 out of the 51 leaned toward staying in management! Zero chose 100% management.

This isn’t that surprising, and the people in this situation seem to know what’s up: They listed the #1 benefit of management as comp (21 of 51 responses). And their most frequent pick for the biggest downside of IC was lower earning potential (20 of 51 included this in their multi-select).

… and miserable.

This group also reports worse quality of life: 47% said their current role leads to worse quality of life, vs. 39% saying better quality of life. This is much worse than the average across the whole group, where only 20% say their current role leads to worse quality of life, vs. 65% saying better. That means that this group of managers are more than twice as unhappy in their current roles, vs. the rest of the respondents.

For this group that’s considering moving to IC work, there are a few key themes:

• Burnout and overwhelm - ‘I was so frustrated and so overwhelmed,’ ‘burnt out,’ ‘putting in a lot of hours… it just drained me completely,’ ‘eating into family time,’ managing 76 employees, working 10-hour days.

• Loss of meaning - ‘I didn’t really feel a lot of fulfillment,’ ‘I don’t know what the impact is,’ the work feeling ‘stale,’ and feeling that they’ve drifted from the craft they loved.

• People problems - difficult direct reports, having to cover for underperformers, a ‘nasty episode with a colleague,’ and having to fire people.

vs. happy managers, who tend to focus on mentorship.

Again: The group I described above are the ones who are looking at IC roles. The ‘I’m a manager and I want to stay a manager’ were (as you’d expect) a lot happier.

The managers who want to stay managers had a much better quality of life: 75% said work had a positive impact (vs. only 39% for the considering-IC group). And only 13% report that their role makes their life worse (vs. 47% for the other manager group). And their net score (+62pp) is actually similar to the former-managers-now-ICs (+59pp).

So, it seems like the people who genuinely want to manage and the people who left management are equally content. But the people stuck in the middle are suffering.

What’s the difference?

What separates the ‘stay’ managers from the ‘considering IC’ managers seems to be what they love, not what they hate. Both groups complain about the same things - too many meetings, accountability for things they can’t control, less hands-on work. The downsides are almost exactly the same, in rank order. The difference is on the benefits side:

• The ‘want to stay’ group’s #1 benefit is coaching and mentorship (28 selections, vs. 13 from the considering-IC group).

• The considering-IC group’s #1 benefit is compensation (21 vs. 15 for the stay group).

People who want to stay in management are happier in their roles and enjoy mentoring and coaching people (which was the top pick across all respondents), while the people looking for exits are unhappy and want to get out… but feel trapped. The thing keeping them there is the one remaining benefit - the money.

Part 5: How to build High-impact ICs (HI-Cs)

Going back to that one big stat: Most people would do IC work… IF comp and influence were equal. But that’s a big effing IF. That’s kind of the whole point - the gap in how ICs are paid and treated within the org is actually the main barrier.

Traditional IC roles are not going to make as much as company executives. That’s not realistic. But what is realistic is a career path that leads to what I’ve been calling High-impact IC (or HI-C) roles: A HI-C is an individual contributor who can complete a project that delivers business value, end-to-end, on their own.

Setting up this path is going to take effort on all sides.

Companies need to unlock the info flow.

For me, this was the single biggest concern about returning to IC work. After being at the executive level, I know that having the right context makes all the difference. I don’t necessarily need to be the one making decisions, but I absolutely cannot operate without knowing what’s really going on. Without the right info, I knew I’d inevitably get boxed into a corner, waste effort on unimportant stuff, and get pushed into less impactful work.

Unfortunately, most companies operate on some weird ‘Need to know’ basis, where even basic operational knowledge is kept hush-hush. If you want employees to deliver next-level impact… you gotta give them that next level of information.

(I wrote a whole different article about this, if you want to understand this part better: Your AI strategy has a trust problem, not a tooling problem.)

Employees need to step up and own impact.

I’m excited for organizations to start opening up these doors, but if you’re an employee looking for this kind of position, the ball is actually in your court.

The main thing that a HI-C does is deliver impact. Solve problems. Identify opportunities and own them. I totally get that the wrong org structure and bureaucratic BS policies can feel like they’re strangling you. But… they’re strangling your bosses, too.

If you’re waiting for someone to assign you this role, you’re already taking the wrong approach.

When you say you want autonomy (and so many people in this study did!), that also means you’re asking for responsibility: That was actually one of the things I insisted on, when swapping back to IC - the ability to make the calls for my projects. Because that’s one of the awesome/terrifying parts of being a leader: It’s up to you. A lot of Growth stuff is not kumbaya, everyone-agrees projects - there’s a lot of uncertainty and confusion, but someone still needs to make a decision.

The money will follow.

Maybe this is counterintuitive. Sure, lower earning power was a major concern in this study, but I actually think this is a lagging indicator. Traditional ICs don’t get paid well, because their impact is limited.

If an employee steps up to actually own a project that makes or saves the company a ton of money, it’s way easier to justify a larger comp plan for her.

Think of it like professional sports: Every player gets paid more than the coach! Yes, the coaches still make millions per year to make sure that the team works together and all achieves their potential. But each individual on the team gets compensated based on their individual talent.

Sure, there are different types of downsides that come with that, but if elite performers on the fields and courts around the world can get paid more than their managers, maybe us keyboard-jockeys can do the same thing.

Thanks to this study, we know that a large majority of people in tech would choose IC work if the pay was equal.

What would happen if we start paying ICs more than managers? That’ll be the true test of when AI has completely changed the way we work.

Thanks to Jonathan Yagel for editing this post, and also helping to build and review the study!

Appendix - Who are all these people?

• Title: Mostly managers, but pretty evenly split.

• Functions: A wide variety, but mostly Product, Ops, and Data

• Locations: Mostly from the US (60%) and UK/Ireland (30%).

• Age: Mostly 35-44 (49%) with most of the rest being evenly split between 25-34 and 45-54 (23% each)

• Gender: More men (63%) than women (37%)

• Education: Mostly Bachelor’s degrees (49%), then Master’s (25%)

• Industry: About half (54%) directly in the tech/software industry, with tech-focused workers in other industries making up the other half.

• Org size: Evenly distributed across org sizes, but ~55% ≤1k employees, 45% ≥1k employees.

Title:

Functions:

Location:

Age:

Gender:

Education:

Industry:

Org Size:

Everyone wants to be a content creator these days. Or an influencer. Or, if you speak LinkedIn, a thought leader. Personally, the last 2 give me the ick - please never ever call me an influencer.

I get it. Attention feels good. Likes, comments, reposts, follower counts. They all scratch something in our fragile, validation-seeking egos. We live in the attention economy, after all. And to be fair, I’ve encouraged plenty of people to start posting or writing. I genuinely think more people should share what they know.

What I don’t think people see is what it’s actually like on the other side. So if you’ve ever thought about putting yourself out there, here’s how it worked for me (and what no one tells you about being a ‘creator’).

Sponsored by (one of my faves!) Firecrawl: Firecrawl is the web data API to search, scrape, and interact with the web at scale. Turn the live web into clean, structured data your agents can actually use. Give them a try!

My personal story

Why I started ‘creating content’

I didn’t start creating content because I want to become some sort of influencer (puke). In fact, if your motivation is to become an influencer, please just don’t.

For me, it actually started after I was a guest on Reforge a few times. It hit me how much valuable knowledge is trapped inside companies. Every team is figuring out things that would help hundreds of other teams, but the lessons are never outside the org. Sometimes they don’t even make it past the team that learned them - they just stay locked away in Slack threads, Notion docs, and people’s heads.

Instead, what does get shared in public is a lot of nonsense. So many people posting online have never actually done the job. They’re throwing out generic career advice or recycled frameworks that sound profound but fall apart the moment you actually try to apply them, much less scale them. (If I see one more post saying the secret to career success is ‘having a great manager’ with 10,000 likes, I might blow a gasket.)

That feeling only got stronger once I started advising startups. I was shocked by how similar everyone’s problems were. Different companies, different industries, different stages... but they were all struggling with the exact same growth, product, and organizational challenges. It was almost demoralizing. Why are we all separately relearning the same lessons instead of sharing what works, what doesn’t, and why? We’d make progress so much faster if we spent less time rediscovering the basics and more time solving the next generation of problems.

Mistakes like, for example: Not paying attention to activation. Swinging over to enterprise too early if you’re B2B. And over-focusing on how your homepage looks when it doesn’t even f#*%ing matter.

So my content creation journey started with: ‘Hey, I have thoughts. I have years of experience. They actually have some pretty cool patterns in them. Some of them are right, some are wrong, some don’t apply to everybody, some do. Why don’t I just start sharing them?’

How I started: LinkedIn

Twitter/X was a hot mess express at the time (maybe still is, ha), so I figured LinkedIn was the way to go.

I started with just bite-sized pieces of content. My posting rules were very simple: If I said or shared something 3 times in normal conversations, I was just going to post about it.

Another rule came from Brian Balfour, which I still use to this day. He said the content that performs best falls into two buckets. One, it’s a contrarian take. Two, it’s a pattern. A contrarian take works because you’re basically saying what everybody is thinking but isn’t willing to say, or maybe hasn’t even recognized is true. It’s provocative, so it gets people talking! Patterns also work because our brains loooove recognizing patterns.

So I started with just that - little pattern frameworks created and screenshot from Miro boards, a couple of thoughts, and that’s it.

I started with almost no engagement (as in: 20 likes = BIG deal) and maybe posting once a week. And I kept it in my own voice, with my own typos. I was just trying to share, not go viral.

At first, it felt like the same three people were always liking and commenting on my posts. I felt like this guy:

I quickly realized that my ‘superpower’ was around product-led growth - I had so many nuggets to share that came so naturally. And people reacted! My follower count grew from a few thousand connections to 40K in a year.

Then one day I created a meme. And it blew up.

So just like that, memes became A Thing for me. And really it’s just another form of pattern recognition attached to a picture. I noticed people tend to digest hard truths better in meme form than just through words. A picture is worth a thousand words, they say :)

I always posted about what I’m working on or involved in, so as my career and interests shifted, I gradually added things like product-led sales, career optionality, and now (of course) AI.

Cone of shame moment: there was a period where I got caught up chasing impressions. I made it onto LinkedIn Lunatics once (or twice), which is both embarrassing and probably a necessary awakening step in everybody’s social posting game.

In my defense, all of the social platforms are optimized to make you addicted. Most people talk about the consumption/scrolling side, but this is true on the creation/posting side too. When you’re on them a lot, they pull you into wanting to chase impressions, chase likes, chase that juicy dopamine hit.

I have this addiction reasonably under control now (do I?), but I still have to constantly remind myself that impressions are not the same as impact. My north star isn’t followers, likes, or views. It’s making a meaningful contribution to the space.

Not every post will land: some will flop and some will miss the mark entirely. That’s part of putting ideas out into the world. As long as, on average, I’m contributing more signal than noise, I’m ok.

How it’s going: this newsletter

About 2 years in, people kept asking me, ‘Do you have a blog? Do you have somewhere these insights live that’s more than just bite-sized frameworks? Somewhere with deep-dives on the problems and solutions?’

At first I pushed back. I was like, ‘Listen, Lenny already exists. The world does not need another blog.’ But people kept pushing me. I felt like the market was pulling me into it.

So I started this Substack. Especially because I’ve seen so many social media platforms start to lock down distribution, I wanted to be able to ‘own’ my distribution, even if the mighty social algorithm changed.

It ended up being pretty successful. I’m almost at 100,000 subscribers on Substack:

and ~230,000 on LinkedIn. I mean… this is what 100K people looks like IRL..

WHUT. I’m sorry, but my mind cannot comprehend this. It’s absolutely crazy. I’m so thankful to every single one of you. Really.

And even though it wasn’t my initial goal, I’ve been able to figure out a good monetization system for my content, too (I’m a growth person, what did you expect!?). I make every new newsletter edition free, and then ask people to pay a monthly subscriber fee if they want access to the archive of past posts. (If you’re one of those 1000+ paid subs - thank you! It really means more than you know.) Also: I mostly ungate the career-focused stuff, because I really want everyone to have access to that.

And (of course) companies also started reaching out asking to buy sponsorship slots on the newsletter (which, believe it or not, sells for thousands of dollars per issue). I’ve chosen to only work with companies where I personally use and endorse the product, or at least am trying it out for myself, so that I’m only sharing stuff with my readers that I really think they should try. So it feels like a win for everyone.

Lastly, I have an amazing editor who helps me turn my ideas into long-form content. My superpower has always been short-form thoughts and verbal rants, not structured essays - especially since English is my second language. I feel incredibly lucky that Jonathan Yagel reached out one day and offered to help (my grammar mistakes and broken sentence structures must have burned his eyes). He’s become my partner in crime, taking my stream of consciousness and somehow turning it into something coherent that people actually want to read. Every piece still goes through my final pass, but he saves me days compared to writing everything from scratch.

The good & The bad

I’m grateful that the content creation stream has created an additional income stream that has given me even more career optionality. I’m at the point where I make more from my solopreneur activities (content, advising, etc) than my full-time salary, which is the type of career optionality that I’ve always been very keen on and something I advise everybody else to do as well.

However, the best part is when I go speak at conferences and people come up to me and say, ‘Hey Elena, this post you wrote changed the whole direction of my career,’ or ‘You helped me get a promotion,’ or ‘I got into growth because of you and I love it.’ It warms my heart to hear that stuff I’m sharing is having a positive impact on people’s careers and lives. Honestly, that's what this is ALL about. Building shareholder value is great, but nothing compares to knowing you've made a positive impact on someone's life.

But there are also negative sides to it.

For one, creating content can turn into a grind. It can start feeling like you’re on a schedule. It stops being a creative or free or fun process. I still mostly publish based on when I feel like I have something that I’m excited to share, but I have a sense of obligation to both paid subscribers and sponsors to post on a certain cadence. If you’ve ever tried to turn something you love into something you have to do on a schedule, you know what I mean.

Another downside isn't as obvious. The more people who read your work, the more likely someone will make it their mission to point out what you got wrong and dump on you. Sometimes they're right, and that's valuable. But often it feels less like a discussion and more like a game of finding flaws. That can be surprisingly draining.

Maybe a blatant disclaimer would be helpful?

DISCLAIMER: I am just one person, sharing her opinion. I do not have a team of analysts or corporate comms to check everything. I am almost definitely wrong about some of the stuff I say. My opinion is subject to change. This is not legal advice, investment advice, or anything else except hopefully some perspective that you may not have considered before.

I want to challenge how people think and I’m glad when they do the same for me.

What sucks is how personal it gets: People make confident claims about my motivations. They try to crap on my professional experience to show that I don’t know what I’m talking about. And just generally say hateful things about me as a person. Some people seem to make attacking others into a personal hobby.

This gets even worse when you’re doing long-form writing. It seems like the people who are most enraged by stuff I write … often haven’t read it. Maybe they see a headline or see someone else’s description, or maybe got an AI summary. And I know everyone’s time is limited and attention spans are short, but it’s wild to have someone yell a claim at you in a comment on an article where you made that exact claim, just because maybe it was below the fold in the article?

(Maybe I should have easter eggs in my content: ‘If this makes you mad and you want me to know why I’m wrong, be sure to use codeword `Banana` in your comment, so I’ll know you read this far,’ haha)

And that gets really hard to deal with. In fact, I’ll be taking August off to recharge. I need to step away for a bit and find the motivation to write again.

The third hard thing is that my writing is all anchored in my own experiences. Because of that, it naturally drifts depending on what I’m working on at the time. And people don’t always like that.

For example, people say I post too much about AI, or they call me an AI slop farmer, or a sellout because I talk about Lovable so much. But… Lovable is my experience right now. That’s my life. It consumes a huge percent of my awake hours every day, so yeah, I’m going to talk about it a lot. It’s what I spend most of my time thinking about. I’m an operator at this company.

If you’re going to follow my operator/creator path (which I think is the best way to make content, btw), you’ll have to figure this out, too. Keeping your day job helps to anchor your stuff with real experience, but some people see talking about your own company as a conflict of interest.

Every company I’ve been at (unless they explicitly told me I couldn’t post about it, which has actually happened a number of times, lol) I’ve talked about what the product does and how people could or should use it. That’s what I’m thinking about 24/7, so it naturally factors into my writing.

People don’t always like that because they have a version of me in their heads. They want me to fit into a particular mold they’ve created. The more people see your stuff, the less you get to control whether their perception matches reality.

Another negative is having your views on display in real time, even as they’re developing. This is kind of like how I pity the kids these days who are having their thoughts and still-developing opinions recorded on social media forever. Thank goodness my AIM status updates have disappeared into the void, because I wouldn’t want anyone to see my teenage hot-takes, now.

But when you’re sharing your opinions in public and your entire role, job function, AND industry are getting flipped upside down, your opinions will probably change. And for some reason, some people on the Internet treat that as an act of hypocrisy or high treason.

Plus, there’s just the general weirdness that comes with being more visible to more people. Once you cast your net far enough, you inevitably get creepy people in your DMs. That’s just something you have to ignore and develop a thick skin against.

Tips for you

My #1 tip for people who are considering creating more content is: Respond to comments! If someone took the time to read your stuff and share their thought, you should engage with them. And that’s a policy that I’ve maintained since the beginning - and if you stop wanting to engage with people who read your stuff, then what are you really posting for?

My #2 tip: Just be unapologetically yourself! Your goal isn’t to go viral. It’s to find your people. Forget the algorithm, the rules, and the ‘best’ posting frequency. It’s the only strategy that’s sustainable, because trying to fit some mold will not only feel exhausting, but will also feel forced and quickly gross.

My #3 tip: Find what you want to be known for. Just like companies need product-market fit, creators need creator-market fit. You can’t be everything to everyone. What’s your specialty? What’s your unique knowledge? What’s the perspective only you can bring? Find an underserved niche, solve a real problem, and keep showing up for those people. The goal isn’t to appeal to everyone. It’s to become valuable to someone.

So… if you’re thinking about starting your own creator journey, I’d still recommend it. As I said 6 months ago (feels like a lifetime): Companies are going to continue to treat follower counts as a factor in hiring decisions. And for certain solopreneurship paths, it’s not something you can totally avoid. Public credibility is a big deal in generating business pipeline.

But if you do: Just go in with your eyes open. If you go in for the right reasons, it will change your life. If you go in for the wrong reasons, I guess it will change your life too, but it won’t be worth it.

Thanks for reading. Always.

Edited by Jonathan Yagel.

Meanwhile, I’m over here asking ChatGPT to rewrite the same paragraph for the third time because it keeps defaulting me into ‘LinkedIn wisdom post’ mode. GARH.

Look: I work at an AI company. I use AI all day. I strategize with it. I build products with it. I write with it. I analyze data with it. But even I feel like everyone else has cracked the AI code while I’m still using some basic tutorial version over here.

So I started asking a simple question whenever someone told me AI had changed their life: ‘Cool. Show me.’

And most of the time I see some basic workflows. Summarizing Slack. Answering emails. Doing scheduled scans. Performing research and booking something. Sending emails out of Claude. Okay…. it’s useful. But show me something that has become so critical in your day that if I took it away tomorrow, your work would actually fall apart. Show me something truly life changing.

It turns out that’s a super short list.

But the noise continues on volume 11/10.

So this is my desperate plea... Can we PUHLEASE stop this AI Confidence Theater, people? It’s doing more harm than good.

This post is sponsored by Firecrawl. Firecrawl is the web data API to search, scrape, and interact with the web at scale. Turn the live web into clean, structured data your agents can actually use.

(P.S. I personally use Firecrawl in my Lovable apps all.the.time - most recently to scrape this very blog so my AI double could use my latest posts as context.)

It is screwing a lot of stuff up

This fake AI hype is hurting all of us. This is not a victimless crime.

The reality distortion hurts innovation

The AI headline chasers and fakers are robbing people of a real, cool Ah-ha moment with AI tools that could get them excited and bought-in. The problem is when you see someone talk about their ‘life-changing’ (it’s always ‘life-changing’) new AI-powered system but… it doesn’t actually work. So you just assume that all of the AI stuff is BS and keep your head in the sand.

And instead of celebrating the saved time and reduced annoyance that AI actually can do right now, people are out here promising employee-replacing super agents… despite the fact that their agents only trigger 50% of the time and only deliver decent outputs if hand-fed very specific context (and get shit wrong most of the time)

This weird reverse-hustle hustle culture?

I didn’t have ‘Kind of misses toxic hustle culture’ on my 2026 bingo card and yet, here we are. Because now we have an even more toxic environment.

Five years ago, people wanted you to think they worked harder than everyone else. Today they want you to think AI does it all.

Five years ago, people shared and bragged about big outcomes: revenue, user milestones, fundraising, headcount. Today people are just highlighting how many tokens they’re burning. Everyone wants you to believe they have an invisible team of AI employees running their business while they think big thoughts. But where are those business outcomes, tho?!?

Five years ago, people bragged about waking up at 5am, doing cold plunges, having inbox zero, and working while endlessly Peletoning. Now it’s all about having 17 agents, not opening email, and AI running your business. It’s the exact same performance, just with different props.

Hiring for real expertise is a mess

This has also blown up the hiring process. AI has made average intelligence incredibly cheap and it has given everyone the vocabulary of expertise. It used to be that if someone started talking about vector databases, MCP, agents, memory, or RAG you assumed they knew what they were doing. Today, everyone knows the words. AI regurgitates some smart one-liner for them and 3 hot takes. Everyone sounds like they have an experience.

But sounding competent and being competent are completely different things. So how do you hire in the middle of that? Not that the old interview and hiring process was so great - I’ve been frustrated with it for years. But verbal interviews for real don’t work anymore. Just because you can ‘confidently’ explain MCP doesn’t mean you can build one or you’ve built a single workflow that anyone actually depends on. Case study and work trials become absolutely necessary to cut through the bullshit.

The FOMO is exhausting

All this leaves people feeling demoralized. Instead of getting excited about how these tools could help, it mostly just feels like we are all terribly behind and it’s all completely impossible.

Overall, our brains just can’t comprehend this level of change. Especially for people in tech, this is all happening so fast. Think about the fact that 200 years ago, we were just getting basic sanitation figured out, and now we have to figure out how to manage all-powerful (but also really inconsistent and sometimes disappointing!?) artificial intelligence that is going to help/replace our jobs? It’s just so much. We don’t need people yelling at us all the time about how we’re behind.

What I don’t like about it is that it creates a fake baseline. If everyone around you appears to have figured something out about AI that has transformed their work, then using AI to summarize meetings suddenly feels embarrassingly basic. You stop appreciating the things that genuinely save you time because someone else claims they’ve done so much more.

Why is this happening?

There are a few big reasons that come together to make this happen: social media rewards superficial hype, the stuff AI can do is evolving faster than we can keep up, and companies are incentivizing this sort of behavior all up and down the org chart.

Problem 1: Hype gets clicks

We live in a world where attention is the currency. And that attention is generally measured in impressions. This is the dopamine hit that people are chasing - can you go viral? Can you get everyone to engage?

The way to capture attention is to say something shocking or unexpected, so everything gets exaggerated. Legitimately cool use cases get elevated from ‘This saves me 15 annoying minutes every week’ to ‘ZOMG THIS CHANGED MY LIFE’ or ‘USE THIS WORKFLOW OR YOU’LL BE PERMANENTLY UNEMPLOYED.’

Problem 2: It’s the wild west out here

When we’re talking about content creators sharing their magical use cases on LinkedIn and X, the tricky thing is that AI really CAN do crazy stuff. If it were all fake, then we could all just ignore it. But people actually are building stuff all the time that could totally change how you and I work every day. So, we can’t just ignore it.

But it’s also hard to confirm. Like, are they using a different LLM model than me? Is my data not structured right? Did I mess something up in setting up the workflow? Or… did they just fake it, and all of this is impossible? There’s no way to know.

This is not a problem that we had to deal with previous phases of tech. No one was creating ‘I just built this INSANE setup with Dropbox’ posts to try to go viral… everyone would have just looked at the description and immediately called bulllllshit.

Problem 3: Marketing teams are selling certainty where none exists

Traditional software was ‘easy’ to message. Click the button, get the outcome. AI doesn’t work like that. It opens up more possibilities, use cases become loosely defined, and it needs the right context to succeed. Sometimes it’s incredible. Sometimes it’s just stupid or confidently wrong.

But read the landing pages and you’d think every AI product is a magical employee that never sleeps, never makes mistakes, and runs your company better than anyone else.

The thing about all this AI innovation is that it’s also the era of trust-based growth. If you over-sell, it will be discovered and no one will trust you anymore. Right now, maybe all of this hype feels like free attention and money. But if you take that route, you’ll pay for it in the end.

P.S. I don’t even blame marketing teams. They’re doing what marketing has always done: selling the best possible version of the product. The problem is that with AI, the gap between the demo and day-to-day reality can be enormous. And every exaggerated promise makes people trust the next AI product a little less.

Problem 4: Pressure from the top

Inside companies, this starts at the very top. Even above the execs - at VC level. Because the investors have been promised AI-powered miracles. And this means that execs need to demand AI-powered miracles from their employees. Which means that employees are being asked to do the impossible with (often underperforming) AI tools. Which means that employees are massively incentivized to perform the AI confidence theater to justify career progression, or maybe even protect their jobs.

Cut it out. You’re only hurting yourself.

If we’re going to stop the charade, it’s gonna take a group effort.

For content: Stop sharing (and spreading) the hype.

If you’re reading this and you’re guilty of posting exaggerated nonsense about your 100x AI Agent Workflows… stop it.

The good news is that there’s plenty of amazing stuff to be done. You don’t need to make things up or exaggerate. Just go deep on the stuff you know, and spend the time to build something really cool that actually can make real impact. If you share something that seriously changes how people work, they’ll always remember you. Some clickbaity title and false promises makes you forgettable or hateable.

And if you’re watching that kind of hyped content: You can be part of the solution, too. Hold your favorite creators accountable! Ask them to show you the receipts! If you know that something doesn’t work, don’t just let it slide.

And do NOT amplify it unless you try it yourself. If it doesn’t work and you spread it, you’re responsible, too.

For companies: Build your foundations.

The corporate side of this is a little bit trickier. Because again, it starts at the top.

• Execs: Set reasonable expectations. This means managing your investors to tell them what you can actually do. This also means setting benchmarks for your organization - creating unreasonable expectations only comes back to burn you.

• Managers / Team Leads: Focus on outcomes. Show your leadership what your team can move and use AI to amplify that. Don’t just start with AI and shrug your way to how it connects to business impact. If your team is still experimenting with AI tools and workflows, give them the space to build something that will really last.

• Employees: Figure out the actual impact. Ask for the time and training to get better with the AI tools that interest you! Everyone is talking about AI, but if you can actually connect it to fixing core business problems, you’ll be a real hero. Figure out how to anchor in outcomes! (Understanding and delivering this kind of impact is how you become a Hi-C, btw.)

My biggest career advice for anyone right now: spend a few hours a week trying something new with AI. It’s not a lunch, 5 mins between meetings, after work, or weekend activity. Learning AI IS the job right now. Make legitimate space for it.

Let’s just be honest & talk about the hard part

Seriously, people. Content creators. Company leaders. Employees. Marketing teams. Let’s just be honest about what we and our products can actually do with AI.

The first prompt is the fun part. The next thousand prompts is where real value is created. Let’s make sure we cover THAT part - what happens when the models change, the prompts stop working, the API behavior shifts, or the integration breaks and no one notices.

AI systems aren’t ‘set it and forget it.’ They’re living systems that need monitoring, evaluation, iteration, and constant tuning. That’s where the real work happens. That’s where the real value gets created. And somehow, that’s the part nobody posts about.

If you’ve built something amazing, tell people. But if you’ve built a promising prototype, say just that. We will still be excited, promise. If your workflow saves you 20 minutes a day, celebrate that. If your AI agent still needs babysitting or constantly messes up, admit it.

AI is already the coolest tech innovation of our lives… we don’t need to pretend it’s magical too.

Edited by Jonathan Yagel.

And maybe that’s not such a bad thing. The old way of experimenting had its limits:

• Focus on minor tweaks instead of big bets

• Optimizing superficial surfaces instead of foundational complexity

• Avoiding monetization (‘It takes 6 months of decision approvals & build out. If you are lucky.’)

• Product mostly testing through previous/post, instead of actual A/B tests or feature flags

• Focusing on fast wins - results measured in 2 weeks

Some of this made sense, back when product development was slow. There was so much bloat and so many surfaces that just creating awareness of features and explaining how to use them was a win.

But even then, many of those experiments were just pulling up revenue (if anything). They weren’t actually having incremental progress. But by improving the experience a bit or creating some urgency, we made this thing (which would have happened anyway) …

Read more

For decades, creating software required access to a small, highly specialized group of people concentrated in a handful of tech hubs and funded by venture capital. That meant only ideas large enough to justify those costs ever made it into the world. As the cost and complexity of building collapse, that constraint disappears. The winners won’t just be faster developers. They’ll be teachers, real estate agents, accountants, coaches, consultants, small business owners, and domain experts of every kind solving problems they understand deeply. The future of software won’t be defined by a tiny group of elite builders. The future of software will be defined by everyone else.

Get ready to start seeing (and hopefully building) more and more p…

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Sure, having the right AI tools and skills is part of the equation. But even the best employees with all the most magical tools will get trapped… if your org structure and culture don’t adjust.

Right now, many companies already have the technology they need to go much faster. The blocker is company systems that are mostly designed to prevent things from happening. The power is centralized and all the team members are treated like a risk vector. Exhausting approval cycles, super tight boundaries on roles, unbreakable title-based hierarchies, and a whole tier of middle managers whose main job is to keep everyone in line.

All of this pretty much screams at employees, ‘We don’t trust you, stay in your lane.’

And it should be obvious: Rapid innovation cannot happen in that kind of environment. Super high-impact individuals and high-velocity teams will shrivel up and die.

Everyone’s talking about AI agents, but what you really need is employees with agency. And if you don’t figure out how to give them the access and autonomy to make decisions on behalf of your organization, all of your AI innovation efforts are screwed.

Sponsored by Optimizely’s Test + Learn Event (with me!!): On June 17, I’ll be speaking at this free, virtual event about how testing has shifted:
- Acquisition testing → Monetization
- Tiny conversion lifts → Bigger strategic swings
- “Growth at any cost” → Growth with margin discipline
- Endless optimization → Faster learning cycles
→ Register here.

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‘Protecting’ employees by limiting access and autonomy

Most modern companies are pretty much built around a command-and-control, power-at-the-top model. Each employee is treated like an assembly-line worker with one specific function. ‘Do your job, don’t ask questions, we’ll do the thinking for you.’ The goal is to bring order to the chaos of big, broad organizations with lots of moving parts. If everyone thinks for themselves… who knows what could happen!

There are a couple of obvious ways that this gets applied:

1 - Access is gated by titles

One of the big reasons everyone is striving for bigger titles and team management positions is… that’s where you’ll be heard. That’s where you can actually get the required information. That’s where you get invited to the right meetings and channels.

Companies say they want high-impact ICs, then hide the information required to have impact behind manager titles.

Literally. When you get a manager promotion, you’re in a separate Slack channel where information is being shared with you that you had no access to, before.

We make assumptions that employees are not to be trusted unless they’ve earned their title - even if that was external, earned at another company.

2 - Only the bosses get to make decisions

Decisions are suuuper costly in organizations. It takes forever to make them and it’s almost impossible to reverse them, so you better get them right. Which means that everything is routed to the Very Important People who can make those decisions.

So decisions are slow because they’re expensive. They’re expensive because they’re slow.

In some ways, the whole system is trying to ‘protect’ the employees - because to be fair, the employees don’t have all the information that the managers do, and it would be easy to make the wrong call without the appropriate context.

The virtuous cycle of faster, cheaper decisions

The AI-native orgs strip out the status theater around the work. Anthropic is a good example: the visible structure is basically “member of technical staff” or “member of non-technical staff.” Not because titles are evil, but because titles often become permission structures. They decide who gets context, who gets heard, and who gets to make decisions. And that is exactly the kind of drag AI-native companies are trying to avoid. Which leads to:

A - Faster decisions.

If you ungate access to information and encourage autonomy, suddenly… the context doesn’t have to pass up-and-down the chain for every little thing.

What’s funny is, lots of companies are realizing how important it is for their AI programs to have sufficient context. ‘If the AI doesn’t have context, it can’t do a good job!’

Well, guess what? Employees also need context to make the right decisions and move forward quickly. Otherwise (just like an AI), they’ll make the wrong decisions or get stuck.

B - Cheaper decisions.

And when you make adjustments on the same day (rather than waiting until the next weekly/monthly/quarterly ‘strategy’ meeting or exec offsite), the cost of a wrong decision will also fall off. In the previous world, the cost of a bad choice was astronomical. It would take so much time to get out of it. But if everybody can run at a really quick pace, it’s okay to make a wrong turn! You can go a bit down that route, turn around, and be back on the right course, faster than other teams even start moving.

Management Bloat

In the traditional org structure, middle management is a feature, not a bug.

The primary job for this role is to travel decisions and information up and down the chain. Up and down, down and up, over and over. It’s a big game of telephone.

This is intentional. Companies don’t trust the junior employees with sensitive information or believe that they even need it.

Now, I will say that managers also do other things… but the structural need for those is being reduced, too.

• Manage cross-functional gridlock and unblocking: ‘Who’s going to do what’ and ‘Where can my team’s priorities fit into your team’s calendar’ and ‘When are we going to find time to support your initiatives,’ etc. But fewer teams and more centralized information make this less necessary.

• Career coaching and guidance: Always important, always necessary… but is the manager really the best career coach for all of their reports? From a personality fit and skills fit perspective, maybe not. This can be more democratized, too.

Companies need to realize that pushing AI tooling into their teams is not going to automatically fix the velocity problems. Yes, having those increased capabilities can empower them, but if they’re still blocked off by bureaucracy and their own limited context, they’ll never move fast.

How do you make this shift?

Okay, company leader. What do you do about this? You’re not going to fix it with a new AI tool, an all-hands announcement, or a slide that says “move faster.” This stuff is too baked into how companies make decisions.

And to be 100% honest - I’m not sure how you switch it. I can speak to the differences I’ve seen in how Lovable operates vs. lots of other companies I’ve worked with, but I don’t know how to make the shift.

But here’s my hypothesis: Don’t start by trying to rewrite the whole org. Prototype it. Try it out with some R&D or innovation teams to see what they can do. Give them aggressive targets and a flat structure, so that their full team has the autonomy and access to actually get things done. Put your sharpest, most high-agency people in the group to start and see how they do.

And be honest: you may need some new people in that group. Not because the current team is bad, but because organizational muscle memory is real. If people have spent years being trained to wait for permission, it’s hard to suddenly tell them, “Actually, now you’re allowed to act.”

The weight of responsibility

Employees need to listen up to this, too. Because of the design of many organizations, lots of employees haven’t experienced the downside of autonomy. Yeah, it sucks to just be treated like an assembly-line robot, being told exactly what to do… but that also spares you from the legitimately terrifying possibility of something going wrong and it really, truly being your fault.

At the end of the day, that’s why leaders get paid more: Accountability. They’re the one who is responsible for a thing getting done. If there’s no one telling you what to do, you have to figure it out for yourself. And if your launch flops or conversion craters or something else vital to the business falls apart… that’s on you.

Fortunately, with the right culture and a high-velocity environment, everything is figure-out-able. But as more companies figure this out and start handing out greater context and autonomy, people will need to consider whether they actually want it. High-impact roles come with status and comp, but there’s always a cost.

Agency > Agents

If your company is anywhere near tech, everyone is probably talking about agents. Are AI agents going to replace all employees?

I don’t think so.

Although I definitely believe that everyone’s current jobs are changing faster than we want to admit, it’s not agents we need to worry about.

At Lovable, we use AI agents internally to make departmental context easier for anyone to access. Each agent has a “parent,” usually the person with the deepest context in that area, who is responsible for keeping the agent accurate and up to date. That matters because it removes one of the biggest excuses for centralized decision-making: “People don’t have enough context.”

But the agent is not the unlock. The unlock is what happens when employees can actually act on that context. That’s the irony of the “AI agents will replace employees” conversation. Agents don’t have agency. They wait to be told what to do. High-agency employees do the opposite: they find the signal, make the call, and push the work forward.

So yes, build agents. Assign them parents. Keep them useful. But don’t confuse the tool with the operating model. The goal is not more agents. It’s more agency.

Trust-based growth starts with Trust-based teams.

A few months ago, I told you that Growth is now a trust problem. Software companies in particular are getting disrupted from multiple angles and the way to survive is to build a connection point with your current and prospective customers.

But that trust isn’t just something you have to build outside of your company. In fact, I don’t really know if it can exist outside of your company if it doesn’t exist inside of the company first. All of the techniques that make external trust-building possible start with you trusting your own employees.

Build in public? You’ve got to let people talk about what they’re actually doing. Sharing legit failures is scary, but that’s how you build credibility.

React quickly to user needs? You can’t have a centrally-managed, long-term roadmap that pushes urgent requests out by a quarter or two.

The old way of doing things was all built around maintaining a polished, fault-free exterior. Now, people want to see some humanity. Unique quirks and imperfections that show off an actual person on the other side of the screen. And that can’t be faked from the top. You’ve got to trust your employees enough to do that - and give them the access and autonomy to make it happen.

You can still adjust to the right internal and external approaches to make all of this work, but you’ve got to make that call, and quick.

How fast can your company make this decision?

Edited by Jonathan Yagel.

My answer is: It’s all about the team. And the team profile is not at all what you’d expect for a company that has $400M+ in ARR. It takes all types of people. Yes, we’re big on AI-nativeness, but that’s not all. You have to have the right blend.

So I’ve been telling people that you need farmers and you need cowboys, and you need old guard and you need new guard. And most importantly: All of these groups need to actually get along.

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Edit: The original title of this post was ‘You’ll lose your job in 2027.’ I changed the headline.

A few readers shared that the original title felt painful in the context of recent layoffs. After reflecting on that feedback, I agreed the framing missed the mark. I’m sorry.

I still stand by the core message: our jobs are changing rapidly, and the point of this post was to encourage people to proactively adapt before change is forced upon them.

For anyone working in tech, I’m sorry to say this, but there’s a real chance you will not have the same job by the end of 2027.

Some of that will be because of layoffs. Intuit and Meta just announced cuts, and I don’t think anyone seriously believes we’re done seeing more.

But even if you keep your seat, your actual job is going to change. A lot. The responsibilities, expectations, tools, scope of what you’re capable of accomplishing, bar for what ‘good’ looks like, and number of people needed to do the work are all being rewritten every day.

It’s already happening to me. I know it will affect you too. In some cases, I fired myself out of parts of my own role. In other cases, I got fired out of responsibilities by the pace of the company, the shape of the org, and the reality of AI. Things I used to own either became less relevant, moved to someone else, got automated, or needed a totally different operating model.

So yes, I technically stayed at the same company. But I do not have the same job. And more likely than not, neither will you.

Change is coming. Which is great news.

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Wait, great news?? Yes. Because right now, it’s not too late. You can start rebuilding yourself before someone else decides what version of your job survives. Imagine yourself like Scrooge waking up on Christmas morning, with a new lease on life.

You still have your job! You still have time to make changes! But… it is time to start preparing for those changes.

You get to decide what to do about it.

The first step is to be honest with yourself about this reality. Yes, it’s uncomfortable. Yes, it’s scary. But the only thing worse is pretending that it’s not happening. (see: Get your head out of the sand.)

But you better not stop there. Here’s what I would put on my ‘Prepare for a Job Change in 2027’ action list:

Step 1: Ask yourself: do you actually like your job?

This is uncomfortable, especially if you’ve been in it for a while. But as things keep changing, the competition is going to get more intense. You’re not going to win out in the same role over someone who loves what they do.

And if there are going to be dramatic changes in your role, maybe this is a chance to finally pivot into something you do get excited about. Maybe that’s a more niche speciality. Maybe it’s switching industries. Maybe that’s going back to IC work (see: IC work is the new career flex - which is what I did).

Step 2: Start exploring career optionality.

I’ve been beating this drum for years. If you’re ever going to do it… now is an ideal time to get started.

If you’ve been telling yourself, ‘I’m too risk averse to go out on my own. I need the stability of a full-time gig.’ Well, I’ve got good news and bad news for you.

Your current path is no longer a safe, stable option.

Even before all of this rapid AI transformation, the stability of full-time work has been pretty sus: If you’re junior, you’re the closest to being replaced. If you’re senior, you’re an expensive line item.

Think of all your friends and colleagues who have lost their jobs despite being awesome at what they do, and you have to acknowledge that expecting your career to last indefinitely is just staying on the Titanic while the lifeboats float away.

So get started right now. Like, today. Because the good and bad news is… solopreneurship doesn’t happen overnight. I wouldn’t recommend that anyone should leave their job with no momentum or progress. It usually takes a while to figure out what you want to do and what the market will pay for, so start that process right now.

Then, by the time you’re ready for a change - whether that’s because your job changes or you’ve got enough progress that you’re ready to go all-in - you’ll have the foundation in place.

And guess what, you’ve already got a great headstart. Just think of your career options as a product you are working on…

Optionality 1: Your skill IS the product.

I went down this road, and I’ve seen many other people go this way too. This path usually leads to a services business: consulting, advising, freelancing, or some other version of trading your time for money outside a full-time employment model.

I started investing in this path about five years ago. Today, I make more from solopreneurship than I do from the cash comp of my full-time role. To get started, think of your brain as a product you need to build a company/growth around:

• Acquisition: Where can you find new clients? Tell your network that you’re looking for 1-2 clients. Share your unique POV on LinkedIn or Substack and chat with people who seem interested. Counter-pitch those recruiters in your DMs! Post your Claude Skills (and Lovable skills, obvi) to show off your expertise.

• Activation & Retention: What’s the ‘Ah ha!’ moment you can deliver to your customer? What is your unique value proposition? Is it one-off or ongoing?

• Monetization: Charging an hourly rate is a good place to get started, but monthly retainers are better to protect your time.

I wrote a deep dive on this approach, here: Is solopreneurship right for you?

Optionality #2: Get yourself a Mom ‘n’ Pop SaaS.

It’s become insanely easy to actually build software products - are you taking advantage? You can take your specific expertise, package it into software for a niche audience, and sell it as a one-off purchase or a monthly/annual subscription?

I call this ‘Mom ’n’ Pop SaaS.’ Not every software business needs to become a venture-backed unicorn cosplay exercise. The goal can be much simpler: keep it small, useful, profitable, and yours. Maybe it only makes $3k/month. But $3k/month in semi-passive income is ahmazing. With the cost of development disappearing, this now has very positive ROI.

And lack of technical background is no longer your blocker - AI tools help you build the actual thing. Cough… give Lovable a try, cough.

Which brings me to the next must-have…

Step 3: Become AI native.

Most people hear the term ‘AI-native’ and either start cheering loudly or throwing up in their mouth a little bit. The reactions are extreme. But one thing is clear: getting good at this will help you keep your job, reshape your job, or find your next one.

Just please get going right now. And don’t overwhelm yourself - start small. The point is that AI-native is not about having an LLM open in your browser all the time. It’s about how you think about the value of your work and how you approach it.

At this point, I see AI-native-ness as a series of tiers, in terms of how you’re actually using LLMs:

Tier 1: Writing buddy

This is a great place to start. All of us write stuff… so use AI to improve the clarity of your written communication, because good communication is still somehow one of the most rare corporate superpowers. Pro-tip: Write your own version and then have AI critique it, so you actually learn. Don’t be sloppy!

Prompt examples:

• “Make this more clear”

• “Help me make my point”

• “Add more evidence to back this up”

• “Rewrite this so a skeptical exec would buy in”

Tier 2: Meeting partner

Granola is in every meeting with me. It writes my todos, reminds me what I committed to, and it legit gives me good manager feedback!

Prompt examples:

• “If you were my manager, what are my strengths and areas for improvement?”

• “Summarize the decisions and who owns what”

• “What did I miss that I should follow up on?”

• “Where did I talk too much or not enough?”

Tier 3: Thinking partner

LLMs are agreeable to a fault and will just ‘Great point!’ you to death, if you let them. But if you approach conversations from a different angle, AI can help challenge your logic, find holes in your thinking, pressure-test your strategy, and bring in additional research.

Prompt examples:

• “Disagree with me. What’s the strongest counter-argument?”

• “Give me 20 ideas, then cut to the 3 best”

• “What am I missing or being naive about here?”

• “Do some deep research”

Tier 4: Builder

Don’t just talk about it. Build it. This could be internal tools or external apps (Satellite Apps, anyone?). Or landing pages, full websites, prototypes… anything.

You should probably use Lovable for this.
Paid subscribers to Growth Scoop get it for a year for free!

Prompt examples:

• “Build my idea, then create 2 versions that solve this problem better”

• “Build me a working prototype of this flow”

• “Make a quick internal tool that does X”

• “Turn this PRD into something I can click through”

Tier 5: Shipping to prod

Yes, you, non-technical person. You can actually create code that goes into the core offering of your company’s product. Instant superpower and job security unlock.

Prompt examples:

• “Fix this bug”

• “Change this text”

• “Make the following changes to this flow”

Tier 6: Agents

This is truly the next level… but proceed with caution. Agents are great when you have strong context and lots of repetitive tasks. But they often require more setup, oversight, and cost than just doing the thing yourself. So it’s worth checking these out, but beware the hype. (And no, that AI chatbot on your site is NOT an agent.)

Prompt examples:

• “Every Monday, summarize last week’s sales and post to #revenue”

• “Each morning, pull yesterday’s signups from the DB and email me a digest”

• “Watch competitor pricing pages and ping me on any changes”

Throughout all of this, the most important skill you can have is creating clarity in all the chaos. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by everything that’s happening, remember that everyone else is, too. So don’t get sucked into the AI performance theater - if you don’t know what matters, what good looks like, or where to focus… AI just helps you do the wrong thing faster.

And if you’re looking for even more practical list of things to do tomorrow morning, I loved Claire Vo’s post about this:

So, you’re gonna lose your job. What are you going to do about it?

I hope you’ll take some time today to think seriously about what your role will look like in a year.

Even if you’re at the same company with the same title, I’d be shocked if you’re doing the same work.

After all, even I got ‘fired’ from my role as a manager a few months ago, to transition into doing IC work. You can’t avoid this kind of change. But there’s still time to prepare yourself. Ask yourself the tough questions, to decide what you really want to do and how you can prepare. Start your solopreneurship journey in some way, to give yourself career optionality. And start building an AI-native skillset, so you can thrive, no matter what.

Take one step toward each one of those. Then, go look at yourself in the mirror and tell yourself: ‘You’re gonna lose your job in 2027 and it’s gonna be your best year, yet.’

Edited by Jonathan Yagel (Fun fact: He built his new personal site with Lovable in an hour!)

But not just a regular, entry-level IC. I’m talking about employees with no direct reports who can do work that used to take a whole team (all while still getting paid like a leader). I’ve been calling this new role the High-Impact Individual Contributor.

And I’m not talking about this as a conceptual, hypothetical idea. I know this type of role exists because… I recently became one of them.

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The old promotion ladder was dumb

I still remember to this day, when I was at SurveyMonkey, a recruiter from Netflix reached out. I was super excited! The first question on the first call? ‘How many people are you managing?’ I only had 3 at the time, and this was for a team of 15, so I was immediately disqualified. That was the #1 metric. Not output. Not budget managed. Not ability to solve the key problems. Just headcount. WHUT?

So getting more people on my team became a hard qualifier on how much impact I could have.

This whole structure is so dumb. Just think about it:

We take people who are truly good at their craft, and we tell them to do a job that has nothing to do with that craft anymore. Our whole system promotes people out of the job they’re good at:

• Average craft, great people skills: could be a great manager, but don’t get promoted.

• Great craft, bad people skills: gets promoted to management anyway.

(Or, you incentivize politics by only promoting people who maneuver themselves… which is a disaster I’ve seen waaay too much and makes my blood boil, so we won’t talk about that here.)

But wait, there is more! These new managers are discouraged from maintaining their craft. Getting ‘in the weeds’ on projects gets described as micromanaging and ‘low value work,’ even though that’s the thing that was valuable enough for me to get promoted!?

When I hit the senior manager level, my boss literally gave me an ultimatum: ‘You have to stop. You can’t be spending all of your time on that stuff. I’m going to watch your Jira history. No SQL queries, no tickets! If you can do that for 6 months, I’ll know you’re ready for a Director position.’

So, I did it. Which… was actually amazing, at the time. Back then, managing people was the way to have impact, so that pushed me forward and taught me to achieve things through the people I managed. I’m super grateful to that boss for forcing me to step away from the keyboard.

But that’s not how the world works anymore.

What’s a HI-C (High-impact IC)?

A HI-C is: An individual contributor who can complete a project that delivers business value, end-to-end, on their own. Usually an ex-leader (manager, director, VP).

In contrast, traditional IC work looks like owning a piece of the puzzle. You are a key part of the machine, but you generally receive projects and hand off projects to someone else, without really being aware of what’s happening on the other side of those walls.

When I say ‘impact’ I mean: Directly affects the key metrics for the business. These all boil down to increased revenue or reduced costs. This is the full picture for the business, and the reason that senior-level people can have an impact (and get paid more) is because they see the whole thing. They’re responsible for getting the project from Point A to Point B that delivers measurable impact.

A director is usually managing managers who each have to get things from Point A to Point B, to get from Point A to Point C. And VPs manage directors, to get things from Point A to Point F. At the very top is the C-suite, who’s trying to get the whole company to move from beginning to end. The bigger your scope, the more money you make for the company.

The problem has always been that leaders were just connecting the dots and coordinating the teams. They weren’t actually doing the work. The whole point of management is to reduce the coordination costs and filter information up and down.

What if… instead, it looked like this?

That’s a Hi-C.

Yeah, should maybe be HI-IC, but that’s hard to say. And my millennial affinity for this juice brand is influencing my choice.

I’m living this world: I’m an IC again.

I’m telling you all of this because I’m living it, right now at Lovable.

This switch actually happened for me back in December. At first, I was building out a growth team. But then we decided to further flatten the org and decentralize growth, which meant... I moved back into an IC role.

I sit within the Product org and continue driving growth efforts… just by myself. We’re now hiring Growth PMs and engineers again, but they’ll sit parallel to me rather than reporting into me. My role is basically to parachute in and out of different projects and teams wherever I can create the most leverage. But mostly, I just have a huge block of IC work that I’m doing on my own. I’m running campaigns. Driving partnerships (did you see my latest LinkedIn x Lovable perk?). I’m coding my own growth optimizations and product updates. These are things that I used to rely on a large Growth org to do… now, I can do it all with just me, myself, and I.

For example, I recently built a prototype of our enterprise pricing page myself and shipped it to prod. In a previous org, that would have required a PM, a designer, and engineers, plus multiple rounds of iteration and at least a week of calendar time. More importantly, it would have pulled a team into something that might not even have been the right direction.

I will say: It messed with my head at first. I kept asking myself: Did I just level up, or did I just give up status? It’s so hard-wired into all of us: Must… have… team… to have… impact! Must have… important… title!

But having been in it for 3-4 months, I can say for sure: I’m lovin’ it. I have almost no meetings. I still do some coaching, but in general, I get to focus my work where I want every day. I get to attack the problems that I think are the most important and see how far I can take it, and just iterate with my own hands. I’ve always loved what I do, but a big part of the job was draining me (building decks for cross-functional alignment). Now, ~90% of my time is spent on the parts I actually enjoy - building.

Maximum IC impact, thanks to ‘Average Intelligence’

The High-impact IC role exists when a single person can complete the whole project from start to finish.

This is kind of like the senior-level ICs of the past (Staff Engineer, Principal Designer, etc)... but even more so, because those jobs were mostly about going super deep into one specific area, rather than being fully autonomous. I’d expect someone of that caliber to be the absolute expert on the code or design of a particular element of business… but not have them run a business function, end-to-end. Plus: That type of super IC role never really translated over to the Growth or marketing side of the house.

So what unlocks this now is (obviously) AI.

Here’s the thing: I think of AI as ‘average intelligence’ (heard this from Ravi Mehta) - which sounds like an insult, but I don’t mean it that way. It’s a really big deal to be automatically at the level of an average designer, an average marketer, an average product manager. Again: It’s not great or innovative or actually differentiated. But you don’t need everything to be at that level, right away.

A lot of times, ‘average’ plus your own craft is all it takes to get a real thing out into the world.

So now we have no excuse to be really bad at stuff - we can all be at least average very easily. Which means we can get things off the ground without needing a full team upfront. You can build, pressure-test, and validate ideas by yourself, and only pull in real experts once you’ve got some momentum.

And when you can ship faster, you can learn a lot faster, too. When building was slow and expensive, there was way more pressure to get everything ‘right’ upfront. That’s why everything traveled up and down the chain. IC → manager → director → VP → back down again. The job of a manager was mostly to review, approve, and de-risk decisions before anything got built.

But when you can build and test something in hours… It’s now becoming cheaper to just try something than to debate it. The cost of the mistakes is much lower now. Which means you don’t need as many layers of decision-making. You don’t need as much escalation. You don’t need someone whose primary job is to sit in the middle and approve or redirect.

Escaping the Coordination Loop

The existing system is all built around coordination, which incentivizes management. Which pushes people into management positions. As the company grows, the rows keep stacking up and up until most of the organization is just coordinating other people’s coordination. I mean... middle management, anyone?

The good news is that the Hi-C structure can do the opposite, and create a positive loop:

When an individual can run a project end-to-end, they don’t need as much coordination. This means you don’t need as many managers. Which means that your comp budget naturally flows to the people having the biggest impact, which are now ICs. Which means that you can keep your best people in the roles that they’re really good at.

How do companies make this happen?

A single person that can have department-level impact? Yes, please. Every company wants that. But… how do you get it? Two things:

(1) The biggest blocker is ungating access to information. This kind of system only works if this type of IC has the same level of context that a senior leader could get. If they’re only getting the bits and pieces that get passed down the line by a thousand gatekeeping middle managers, it’s not gonna work.

To get this really incredible level of impact out of people, you have to trust them. And most large orgs just don’t trust their employees. So, this kind of thing is working at the small AI-native companies, not just because of the natural preference for AI tech, but because the bureaucracy hasn’t emerged around a group of middle managers who need to defend their own value through constant (slow) coordination.

If you want to see if your org can handle this, invite some of your high-potential junior ICs to step up to lead full-stack projects. Wherever they get stuck is going to be a bottleneck for this kind of role.

(2) Recruit people in leadership positions to join you as an IC. Seems obvious, but this almost never happens. What we’ve noticed in pitching this at Lovable is that, yeah, some say ‘Absolutely not. I need another VP title.’ But some of them say, ‘Hells yeah, this is amazing!’ This has never been a conversation because in the past, IC fundamentally meant a reduction in impact… and a massive reduction in salary. But it doesn’t mean those things anymore.

No more mandatory Managers

I hope literally every person reading this is breathing a sigh of relief.

For managers who wake up excited about coaching, team development, cross-group coordination… stick with it! If you love the work, there will still be chances to support these turbo-powered Hi-C folks.

But for the rest of us: Can we retrain ourselves to think of the management path as truly optional?

Traditional ICs: You don’t need a team under you to have a big impact on your company (or your net worth). Keep developing your craft, and figure out how to connect what you’re doing to your organization’s core metrics.

• Marketer? Don’t just plan the campaign. See what customers have been asking for from the product. Figure out if you should be pushing for new users vs. existing users. Build the actual in-product promo experience. Make a list of improvements to the features, and code them yourself.

• Product? Don’t just have your marketing counterparts handle everything related to distribution. Learn about how the market and customers talk about the product. Understand the different demand drivers from different segments (enterprise vs. SMB). Figure out the most effective marketing channels for talking about what you’re building.

Leaders: Stop juggling agendas and decks and quarterly plans, and get back in touch with the craft that started your career. Look at a valuable project on your team’s roadmap that might not happen this month. Instead of delegating it, try to do it yourself (deploy AI as needed). Once you see how far you can take something, you’ll start to have the ah-ha moment that I did. And maybe you can fall back in love with your work again.

But now that serious impact (and the comp that comes with it) can be available without the headcount… let’s all agree to go spend that energy building something we love instead of climbing something we hate.

Edited by Jonathan Yagel.

Most companies seriously underinvest in monetization as a growth lever.

(Side note - when did Sessions get so big??? 6K+ people showed up and I’m hearing it’ll be even bigger next year. Wow. Definitely not an event to miss.)

They obsess over acquisition channels, activation funnels, retention curves, and roadmap prioritization, while pricing and packaging get treated like a dangerous object in the corner of the room. Something to avoid touching unless absolutely necessary.

That mindset is costly.

Because monetization is not just how you capture value. It is one of the most powerful ways to create growth, improve customer experience, and adapt to changing markets.

At Lovable, one of the biggest lessons from the last year has been that pricing should be treated much more like product than policy.

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Hi everyone - Most of you are Growth or product people, which means that one of your closest collaborators is probably: Product Marketing. As I’m seeing roles start to merge and overlap, this is an area you should definitely be aware of. What are AI-native PMMs doing and how can you collaborate best with them? What skills do they have that you should maybe learn? I asked our incredible Core PMM from Lovable, Gemma Casey-Swift, to write this guest post to fill you in. Enjoy! - Elena

How product marketing works these days is unrecognizable from even a few months ago.

Some of it’s the available AI tools, some of it’s the speed of feature releases, some of it’s the shifting job roles. But if you’re trying to launch products in late-April 2026 (it may be different next week!), please reconsider what you think you know about PMM.

One of the biggest changes? Product Marketers used to be a bottleneck. Building a lot of elaborate processes (yes, I said the p-word, I’m sorry) that seemed like they were slowing things down.

Now? Well, now the PMM team is a crucial part of helping your org go fast. Here are a few key ways that product marketing at Lovable has built foundations that the rest of our team needs.

(If you’re a Growth or Product person… hey, friends! Send this to your PMM to make sure they’re tracking. But also maybe read it yourself? Spoiler alert: The more you can do your own product marketing, the faster your career and company will grow.)

Let’s do this!

Elena’s Picks

Hey, I’m trying out a new format for my sponsors! I’ll be specifically recommending products and services I personally use and love.

→ Stripe: Ideal for payment processing and all-things monetization.
I’m giving a talk at their big conference, Stripe Sessions… tomorrow! I’ll be sharing how Lovable turned monetization into a growth lever. Come check it out!
🎁 Come hang out: Register for Stripe Sessions.

→ Customer.io: Ideal for highly-targeted email campaigns based on user behavior.
We use them at Lovable and I’m a huge fan. It’s so flexible and intuitive to use that, before we had our first email marketer, anyone on our team could launch an email campaign! And it was actually cohesive. Now that we do have an email marketer, they’re doing amazing things with it. A product that can serve varying degrees of experience like that is so hard - but Customer.io has nailed it.
👀 Check it out: Learn more.

→ Lovable: What can I say? Yes, I work here. But… I work here because I was obsessed with the product, first. It’s the best way to build an app or site, even if you have no technical experience. Try it out!
🎁 Offer: Get a year of Lovable for free! (For paid subscribers to Growth Scoop)

1 - Enable your team to launch stuff, themselves (vs. expecting everything to go through you)

This is probably the biggest switch. The reality is that we are launching updates wayyy too fast for a traditional PMM-driven launch cadence. In old school companies, you’d have a big Tier 1 launch at your user conference… once a year? Maybe twice if you’re aggressive.

Now, we launch updates that could be tier 1 almost every other week. So, how do we keep up this pace? Definitely not by making everything come through PMM every time. If we did that, we’d always be the bottleneck.

So, instead, we built out the infrastructure to help our team launch stuff on their own.

We tiered launches into a few main buckets:

• Big launches (still Tier 1): These are still big releases (or round-ups of multiple releases) with big moments and active coordination across the teams. Marketing still runs these.

• Tier 2: Still run by product marketing alongside a PM but generally more fluid with a more flexible bill of materials. We often amplify these further post-announcement if the launch is getting good traction.

• Everything else: If it’s not specifically designated for a tier 1 or tier 2 launch, the people building it launch it themselves. Our job as the product marketers is to give everyone the resources they need to do this.

This is the key to going fast. The whole point is to create a culture where people are encouraged to launch their own stuff without PMM being precious. You lose a little messaging control, but you gain momentum. And honestly, some of the content our eng and product team shares goes more viral than any perfectly curated post ever could.

So, what kind of infrastructure are we actually building?

2 - Define your ICP based on actual data (vs. based on brainstorming or wishful thinking)

Providing a clear, consistent Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is one of the most valuable things a PMM team can provide to their organization. Unfortunately, most of these are all over the place and based on some hand-wavy hypotheticals.

Now, no one has time for an ICP that doesn’t drive value.

How do you get that? The good news is that this profile actually already exists. It’s just buried in your CRM, usage data, support tickets, and that spreadsheet someone in sales has been carefully maintaining.

Here’s how we pull the data with help from our awesome insights team:

• Product data: We dug into usage, retention, ARR, and conversion across the full user base.

• Builder surveys: Captured roles, needs, decision-making, and “definition of done.” Paired responses tracking expectations vs. outcomes across a build cycle.

• Deep-dive interviews: Tapped further into what people were building, why, their emotional state, workflows, needs, struggles, and dreams.

• Internal AI agents (built on Lovable, live in Slack): Built by our insights team and connected to our full library of user calls, surveys, and interviews. We ask questions in natural language and get back themes, quotes, and patterns on demand.

The biggest shift for me was realizing our ICP is genuinely “everyone,” and you can’t ignore that.

My old instinct was to narrow: pick one persona, one segment, one use case, and aim everything at them. But when the product is category-defining and/or general-purpose, demand can show up from solo-builders to huge enterprises all at once. Even if this makes product marketing and prioritization hard, you can’t ignore clear signals.

This is also why ICP reviews can’t be an annual ritual anymore. PMMs traditionally set an ICP in January, build a deck, and let it calcify. That cadence won’t work today. We review which segments are growing, converting, expanding, and churning weekly. Most quarters there’s a small adjustment. Some quarters there’s a real one, and catching it early changes what marketing, product, and sales should be doing right now.

Naming the ICP is one thing, the actual job is making the rest of the company move with it. PMM is constantly refreshing core messaging, channel mixes, targeting and talk tracks.

We package ICP insights into clear updates and make the rounds on Slack channels, all-hands, team meetings, 1:1s with leads, etc.

3 - Constantly interview customers (not just to start, or when you’re forced to)

Most product marketing teams either rely on other teams to gather direct customer feedback… or they just don’t get it at all. But if you’re going to build fast and launch fast, you need to be talking to your customers a LOT. Do not let sales or CS block you (this was the bane of my life for years).

When I joined, me and our Growth PMM immediately linked arms and packed our calendars with back-to-back interviews. We went to every team and asked them a million questions about our users.

On each customer call, we asked the same five questions every time:

1. “What were you trying to do when you found us?”

2. “What did you try before Lovable?”

3. “Walk me through the moment you decided to sign up.”

4. “What almost stopped you from using it?”

5. “How do you describe Lovable to other people?”

We recorded everything (with permission) and looked at trends and patterns.

This kind of information is the lifeblood for any product-based business. Having real-time feedback on what’s working and what’s not helps everyone go faster. So, what were the pain points that users mentioned?

• “Hiring developers is expensive and slow”

• “I tried no-code tools but hit limits immediately”

• “I’m not technical but I have ideas”

And it wasn’t just the themes. A big part was making note of the exact language they used:

• “It gives me superpowers” (not “it writes my code”)

• “I had a working prototype by lunch” (outcome-focused, time-specific)

• “Finally something that just works” (cognitive ease)

And the moments they got excited about:

• Watching their ideas come to life before their eyes for the first time

• When they shared what they built and someone said “You built this?!”

• When they realized they didn’t need to hire anyone

• When something they thought would take weeks took 20 minutes

And the questions that kept coming up:

• “Is this actually production-ready?”

• “How do I work with my brand?”

• “Can I export the code?”

Back in the day, these insights would probably just sit in a doc. Now, they’re powering tools that every team at Lovable can use, including:

• An interactive messaging house (built in Lovable, naturally). We took the core messaging and turned it into a living document inside a Lovable app. Not a deck. Not a Notion page that goes stale in a week. An interactive messaging house anyone in the company can navigate, search, and pull from by audience, by archetype, or by use case.

• An AI research assistant. Remember the agent I mentioned earlier? Our data scientists built it so anyone at Lovable can just ask things like “How do solo-founders describe the product?” or “What’s the #1 frustration for small teams shipping to production?” and get insights from every interview, survey, and call we have on file.

This means every team can get more accurate, higher-quality context when trying to communicate with current or potential customers. For me, when I was writing landing page copy a few days later, I literally pulled exact phrases:

• Landing page headline: “Ship your ideas in days, not months” (exact phrase from user interview)

• Social proof: “I’m not technical but I have ideas—Lovable is perfect for people like me” (real quote)

• Campaign copy: Added “Your co-founder doesn’t just build, it runs the business with you” (based on how people were describing the product)

4 - Create a simplified messaging framework (vs. making everyone invent messaging from scratch OR read an exhaustive 25-page treatise)

Does your company have a central source for messaging? When I joined, I asked about this… and it turns out one existed from a few months prior but no one remembered what it said.

You’ve probably seen it before: The PMM team beats everyone over the head with messaging documents that are constantly updated and also dozens of pages long, full of details that seem oddly specific and still somehow hard to understand.

But it never hurts to start over, especially if you’re new. I asked everyone on the team: “Show me how you describe what we do.” And that led me to:

• Pitch decks (multiple versions)

• A bunch of different Google docs

• Landing page copy (homepage, pricing, feature pages)

• Email templates

• Links to tons of social content and videos

• Customer-facing help docs

• Interview recordings

• A bunch of deep Slack threads

And we started looking at the patterns:

• People didn’t see Lovable as a coding tool - it was becoming a “full co-founder”

• Everyone mentioned speed (“fast,” “10x,” “minutes not months”)

• Split on whether to lead with AI or outcomes

• Technical teams said “full-stack apps,” non-technical teams said “just describe what you want”

Which also forced us to consider some unresolved conflicts:

• How technical are our audience really?

• What do they really want?

• Is the magic the AI or the speed?

• Are we selling software or selling outcomes?

After some hard conversations, I was able to build a single messaging hierarchy with our core positioning, messaging variants for technical and non-technical users, use cases, and proof points. And again, the thing that helps everyone go fast with this kind of thing is… actually getting access to it. So I presented it to key stakeholders, got feedback, adjusted, and circulated.

Within two weeks, people stopped asking “How should we describe what we do?” The marketing team updated copy across all of our channels. The product team echoes the same messaging in roadmap planning sessions. The founders reference it in company updates. Everyone’s able to move quickly, because they’re not having to build messaging from scratch every time.

BONUS: PUT IT WHERE THEY CAN ASK IT

One of the biggest time sucks for any organization is trying to find the right information. It’s all probably out there… it’s just scattered across Slack threads and Google Docs no one can find, or the PPT decks with “FINAL - Final Actual v2.8” in their titles. If you don’t know whether something is current or accurate, you can’t trust it. And none of the work PMM does matters if it’s buried.

The old version of fixing this was “put it where people can find it”. By that I mean creating and distributing single source of truth documents with links to relevant resources so the same question doesn’t get asked twenty times. That’s still table stakes, and it’s still one of the highest-leverage things a lot of PMMs aren’t doing.

But the bar is moving fast. The next version is “Put it where they can ask it.” Instead of hunting for the right doc, anyone in the org should be able to ask a question to an agent or LLM chatbot, in natural language: “What’s the messaging for the payments launch?” “Who’s our ICP for enterprise pilots?” “What are the top 10 most used features right now?” The goal is to be able to ask these questions and get an answer on demand, wherever they work.

We’re already running a network of specialized agents on Lovable, which are basically small company brains built to help people with specific areas of their work when they need it. Next up: a launch agent connected to our calendar, messaging briefs, and asset libraries, so anyone can ask about upcoming launches, find the information they need, and talk about it.

Conclusion: Product Marketing at ludicrous speed

So, who has time for product marketing? Turns out everyone does when product marketing starts thinking more like an infrastructure, not as a gatekeeper.

Providing a clear ICP grounded in real data, easy access to that live data, self-serve launches, and information that is findable, askable, and usable by anyone in the org. Done right, PMM stops being the team you wait on and starts being the team that makes everyone else faster.

If you’re a PMM reading this, throw out the parts of the playbook that were really about controlling work rather than enabling it. Build the foundations, then get out of the way.

If you’re a Growth or Product person reading this, your closest collaborator just became one of the highest-leverage people in your org, so don’t outsource product marketing thinking, borrow it. Sit in on customer calls, pull from the messaging doc, ask the research bot. The more you can do your own product marketing, the faster you (and your company) move.

PMM isn’t the bottleneck anymore. In an AI-native company, it’s one of the engines. so go find yours, or build the one your team’s been waiting for.

Want more from Gemma? Check out her awesome new substack:

Edited by Jonathan Yagel.

It’s the thing that makes the whole company go around - marketing and sales build their entire personality around it, founders try to change it every week, and engineers nod while secretly thinking ‘this feels made up.’

Define your customer → build for them → grow. Easy. In theory.

But there’s an assumption baked into all of this: Your user is human. I think that assumption is breaking.

As agents begin to interact with products on our behalf - often via protocols like Model Context Protocol (MCP) - your ‘user’ may never actually touch your product.

Which changes pretty much everything.

In the past, even API-first products had a clear answer. Your ICP was still a human, usually a developer. Someone chose your product, integrated it, and used it. But now, LLMs will definitely be involved in every step of that process, and may even replace it. This is the question I think every company should be asking:

Wh…

Read more

We went from on-prem to cloud. Then came digital transformation, where every company suddenly needed to become a software company (whether they had any business doing so or not). Entire stacks got rebuilt - .NET stopped feeling inevitable, Python spread everywhere, and everyone got weirdly excited about Next.js. Mobile came in hot (B2B, naturally, is still deciding whether a phone is a real device). Recurring revenue became our SaaS religion. Remote work exploded, then partially un-exploded. Product-led growth rewired how companies scaled.

Each wave felt big. AI feels 10x bigger. And 10x faster.

That speed is the part I can’t quite process. There are days where it genuinely feels like I need a full-time job just to keep up with what’s happening. And even then, I’m not convinced I am. Am I just getting better at being slightly less behind?? Haha.

And that’s really the feeling underneath all of this: behind.

Not ‘I should probably test that new tool’ behind. More like ‘am I already operating on an outdated mental model?’ behind.

There’s also a weird social dynamic to this whole thing. Everyone has a system, a stack, a workflow that supposedly changed their life, saved them from the burnout, and probably whitened their teeth. It creates this illusion that everyone else already knows what’s going on.

So you hesitate to ask basic questions, because it feels like you’re the only dumb one who doesn’t get it.

Which is almost certainly not true. But it feels true. And the result is a lot of fake confidence theater, a lot of noise, and very little shared truth about what’s actually working.

Then there’s the part that’s harder to admit: a lot of what I spent the last decade learning is losing leverage.

Growth, marketing, product management, sales - these used to feel like crafts. You built intuition over years. You learned what great looked like. You got good at pattern recognition. You earned judgment and respect by grinding through it all.

AI is flattening a lot of that.

It’s a weird experience to spend ten years becoming excellent at something only to watch a 22-year-old produce a suspiciously solid version of it in 14 minutes. Not the best version. But enough to make you sit there like, wow, okay then. And you don’t really get to process that shift. There’s no mourning period. You just move on to the next thing, because everything is changing too fast. (and don’t even get me started on how non-tech people are supposed to keep up with any of this - ‘mass adoption’ feels almost comical.)

Which forces a much more uncomfortable question: if your identity was tied to being good at X, what happens when X gets automated?

Now, senior people still have some advantages, but some of the old signals of seniority are getting weaker fast. The hierarchy flattens. The ladder gets weird. Experience still matters, but not in the clean, linear way we got used to.

Honestly, I think that a lot of that is good. A lot of old hierarchies deserved to die. RIP politics and middle-management. Still, it’s disorienting as we are going through it.

And of course, the reward for becoming more efficient is exactly what it has always been: more work. If AI makes you 10x faster, nobody says, ‘Amazing. Please enjoy your afternoon!’ They ask why you’re not doing 10x more. Productivity gains get absorbed immediately by the system, which is very on-brand for tech.

And underneath all of this is the part we really don’t want to talk about: the economics.

If output goes up while the cost of producing that output goes down, what happens to compensation? What happens to leverage? What happens to the premium attached to knowledge work when more of that work becomes abundant? What happens to company structures when fewer people can produce dramatically more?

My guess is the value shifts.

Away from execution. Away from being the person who can grind through the work manually. Toward taste, judgment, prioritization, and orchestration. Toward deciding what’s worth building, not just how to build it.

Which sounds elegant until you realize those are harder skills to build patterns on and really really hard to teach/learn.

The last question I keep coming back to is whether we are the last generation that built our careers around software as a medium.

We leaned all the way in. We learned the tools, the systems, the playbooks. We rode cloud. We drove digital transformation. We built careers on knowing how to operate software better than other people. We are also, unfortunately, the sandwich generation that has to explain software to our parents and now AI to our kids.

But if software starts getting built, configured, and operated by AI, what happens to the people whose edge was being good at creating software?

I don’t know. And I’m not convinced anyone else does either, despite the amount of confidence cosplay happening online.

And maybe I’m overblowing it. Or maybe this is just what it feels like to live through a real industry shift while still being expected to perform like nothing has changed.

The only thing I feel confident about is that the advantage is shifting.

It’s shifting toward the people who can see clearly, choose well, and adapt faster than the ground is moving beneath them.

No pressure everyone. Everything will be okay. (RIGHT?)