Scaling Through Yourself: Elena Verna on the Rise of the High-Impact Individual Contributor
Lenny's Podcast
Elena Verna usually speaks about product-led growth and product-led sales. At the Lenny and Friends Summit she spoke about careers instead, and specifically about her own. After years of leading teams, some with hundreds of people, she is now an individual contributor at Lovable. She calls it "the best career journey that I've ever taken." Her talk covered three things: why she made the move, what has to be true inside an organization for the move to work, and whether the audience, many of them leaders themselves, should think about doing the same. She also mentioned that two months before the talk she had "nearly got cancelled" for a post about how jobs will change over the next 12 months. This talk was her chance to explain her view at more length.
From leading growth to building again
Verna described her path at Lovable in stages. She built the growth function. She was then, in her words, "fired" from leading it and became an IC. The company then tried the decentralized growth model that she says "every company has to try." Now the function is being rebuilt, but she is staying an IC, and the new team is being built separately alongside her. At the time of the talk she had been at Lovable for almost a year and a half. She joked that her goal had been to last one year, so she considers herself "clear sailing."
What changed most is how she spends her day. Most of her time no longer goes to what she called "cross-functional collaboration hell." It goes to building. She thinks this matters especially for people who reached leadership because they were excellent at a craft, and then found that the only way to move up was to manage people. That was how it worked for her. She said she had been conditioned by that path so thoroughly that leaving it was turbulent, but also refreshing.
The old ladder: impact measured in reports
Verna argued that the traditional career ladder rests on an old constraint: more impact requires more people underneath you. The ladder runs from IC to manager, director and VP, and she said it has "only one currency": how many reports you have.
She gave a personal example. About 15 years ago she interviewed at Netflix and was rejected because of how many people she had managed. She said she is still a lifelong subscriber, and still resentful. Her objection is that she has never believed impact should be judged by headcount. She argued that the equation is now breaking. How much you ship, or can ship, is becoming the measure of impact.
What a high-impact IC is, and what it isn't
Her term for the new role is the "high-impact IC," or HI-IC. She was explicit that this is not simply a senior person with no direct reports. In her definition, a HI-IC is someone who can:
- find a problem,
- make a decision,
- execute on it themselves, across every function needed to reach the outcome,
- ship it,
- and own the outcome, iterating from there.
She pointed out that five to ten years ago this would have been an entire team's charter. She contrasted it with the traditional staff IC. Engineering has long had staff roles, usually focused on architecture, and deep expertise used to mean a narrow functional focus. As she sees it now, the role combines deep expertise with a "broad executional surface" and business accountability.
AI as "average intelligence"
Verna said some people dislike her framing of why this is newly possible: she thinks of AI as "average intelligence." She expects the world to reach AGI eventually, but for now she finds it very powerful to have an average marketer, an average engineer, an average analyst and an average designer available on demand. She joked that this is sometimes better than some teams she has had.
In her view, the practical consequence is that a person needs exceptional craft in only one or two areas. Everywhere else, "good enough" is sufficient to get something to the point where you can learn from it. She stressed that learning is the real goal. Teams don't build because they already know what correct looks like. They build to see customer feedback and reactions, and those tell them what to do next.
When building is cheaper than coordinating
She compared the old process with the new one. The old sequence went roughly: idea, meeting, PM, designer, meeting, engineer, review, approval, ship. She called that a shortened version, since the real process probably had "a hundred more steps" and took three months if you were lucky. The new sequence is: have an idea, build it, learn.
She says she "lives in Lovable all day long." The team ships to production through it. She built the talk's slide deck with it. She does her ideation in it, and she manages her calendar, email and other work through it, though she admitted email is the weakest part.
From this she drew her main organizational claim: "When the cost of building falls below the cost of coordinating, the org chart should change." She challenged the audience on this point. Talk of being "AI-pilled" or "AI-native," she said, covers only tooling. If companies don't change the organizational design beneath the people using those tools, she argued, they miss what she sees as the biggest change underway.
Getting "fired" into the role, and the identity cost
Verna admitted her transition was not planned. She didn't ask for it; she was "fired" from her responsibilities, though not from the company. Her job at Lovable had changed three times in the past year and three months, and she expects it to change again. She said everyone's job there changes every three to four months, and that reorgs happen "every couple weeks." She presented this as the right response to a period some people compare to the industrial revolution. If you aren't changing, she argued, you aren't taking advantage of it.
She was candid that losing the management title was hard. Over two decades much of her identity had attached itself to her title and to leading a team, even though she hadn't wanted that. For the first couple of weeks she wasn't sure whether she had been effectively promoted into "the best of both worlds" or had lost status and future opportunities. Having no team felt almost like being less important. That feeling faded only as she saw that she could keep having an impact.
She treated this as a common experience. People spend so much time at work that identity gets wrapped up in titles, and she suggested it can be healthy to shake that up, especially since she expects everyone's jobs to change within the next year or so. She said she wasn't predicting people would lose their positions, but that what they do will change. Her own daily work is completely different from five or ten years ago. She welcomes that, but acknowledged it takes time "to mourn that ladder" you thought was the goal. Her argument was aimed at a specific group: people who realize that managing large teams and cross-functional collaboration isn't what they're good at or excited by, because they were promoted for their craft. For them, she suggested, AI offers a way to keep influence and status and possibly gain more impact than they had as team leads.
What the work looks like now
Verna owns pricing and packaging at Lovable. She used to need PMs, designers, engineers and a lot of calendar time. Now she builds and changes the pricing page herself, builds prototypes, deploys to production, and does the user research, analysis and optimization. She works with engineers on larger model changes that need deeper engineering, but she is responsible for the whole area.
She compared the feeling to her hobby of power washing, which she finds "oddly satisfactory" because you immediately see the clean surface. Being a HI-IC gives her something similar: what she makes reaches customers almost as soon as she decides to push it, with no cross-functional dependencies in between. She estimated that 90% of her time goes to building or thinking about what to build next. She said running a team was exciting too. What she doesn't miss is sitting in meetings all day and waiting on other teams' prioritization. She also warned how easy it is to let meetings on your calendar take your time instead of spending it on what's right for the business and the customer.
An operating system, not a title
Her central caveat was that you can't simply declare people to be HI-ICs. When she transitioned, she quickly found there were constraints in the system that had to hold for her to stay satisfied and effective. "HI-IC is not just a job title," she said. "It is an organizational operating system." She said five conditions need to be true, whether you want to become an IC yourself and enjoy it, or want to bring former VPs and chiefs onto your team as ICs.
Information has to flow freely
She called this the most important condition. She can only be effective if she has all the information she needs to make the right decision. Current organizational design, she argued, restricts information by design: layers of people filter it before it reaches individual contributors. Removing that requires trusting employees, and it requires fewer management layers.
She described how Lovable handles this. There are no conventional titles, only individual contributors, leads and department heads. There are no managers, directors or VPs whose presence decides the discussion, and no "highest paid person's opinion" that automatically wins. She said everyone is effectively on the same level, with only a clear sense of where an issue should go if it needs escalating. To scale access to information, each team has its own AI agent in Slack. Each agent has a "mom or a dad," people who train it, and anyone with a question about that team's work or documentation can ask the agent.
Authority has to travel with accountability
A HI-IC can't be expected to send a decision up and down the chain five times. Her team and the executive team have to trust her. She noted she still sits on the executive team despite being an IC. The authority she described has three parts: to decide, to ship and, "most importantly," to fail.
She said she has failed many times at Lovable. From outside the company's trajectory may look "up and to the right," but she said her failed experiments have cost Lovable "many millions of dollars." In her account, those failures produced important learnings that later helped the company find more growth. Lovable allows meaningful failures that do affect revenue, and "nobody freaks out" as long as the learning is shared.
Scope isn't defined by function
Her work isn't limited to growth. Sometimes she ships core features, sometimes she helps with marketing, sometimes she goes back to growth product work. This connects to what she described as the cost of approvals: if one person nominally owns something but needs six approvals, they don't really own it. Her rule was that when it is cheaper to try than to debate, the approval chain becomes the expensive part, and teams should be organized with that in mind.
Pay and status have to be decoupled from headcount
She stressed this one. People are deeply conditioned to believe that higher pay requires promotion to manager, then director, then VP. Her pay grade did not change when she became an IC. She went further: if people truly believe in the AI shift, then ICs should be paid more than managers, because an IC can now drive more outcome and impact than a manager could in the old system.
If companies don't do this, she argued, everyone will rationally become a manager, which leads to managers everywhere, "lots of terrible managers." Many of those people, she suggested, never wanted to manage and were pushed onto the ladder. She cited a survey she ran: 42 of 51 people managers said they wanted to go back to an IC role.
She added a personal reason for her move. She doesn't see how she can be an effective manager if she no longer knows what IC work looks like, and she believes it looks very different from five to ten years ago. She treats her current role partly as a chance to learn what one person can now do, so that if she leads a team again she can direct it well.
She was blunt about money. People go into management largely because they want to be paid, and "we're in a capitalism world." Companies that want these people should expect to pay leadership-level salaries, and should also expect leadership-level outcomes.
Don't ask people to do both
Her last condition was that people shouldn't be asked to be managers and ICs at the same time. She has tried it. She hears people say they love getting back to their IC roots while still running a team, and she applauds those who manage it, but she called the context switch very difficult. You can switch contexts a lot within an IC role, and a lot within a manager role, but in her experience switching between the two becomes nearly impossible. You have to pick a path, and choosing the IC path means "scaling through yourself as opposed to scaling through people." She said that requires rewiring how you think.
Separating impact from headcount
Verna closed by returning to craft. She called it "silly" that companies take people out of the roles they excel at so they can move up, and argued that now is an unusually good time for those people to go back, keeping the leadership skills they worked hard to earn while working as ICs.
In her view, AI's most interesting effect on organizations is not replacing jobs, "no matter how sensational those headlines are." It is separating impact from headcount. She asked the audience to look honestly at their own jobs: do they love how they spend their days, and does it give them energy? If so, she said, "keep going. This presentation is not for you." But she said she has talked to too many people who feel drained, and she sees AI as a chance for them to find a career that energizes them again. Her final line: management needs to be a career path, not a promotion.
I'm going to be talking today about something different. Usually I talk about product-led growth, product-led sales, and how to grow your company. Today, I'd like to talk to you about how to grow your career. You're all incredible leaders already in this place. But my career has taken a turn for something different about eight months ago and I've been writing about it more and more and two months ago I nearly got cancelled for writing a post about how our jobs are going to change in the next 12 months and I wanted to speak a little bit more about how that journey has been for me.
I've been a leader at many teams that were mentioned before. I've led hundreds of people in some of those teams and now I'm an individual contributor at Lovable and it has been the best career journey that I've ever taken. I want to tell you about why I decided to do it. I want to tell you what needs to be true in organization to do it and I want to challenge you to think about whether this is the right position for you.
So as I said my name is Elena Verna. I lead growth at Lovable. I've survived at the company for almost a year and a half. It's been amazing. My goal was to make it a year. So I'm like clear sailing at this point. But I built a growth function at Lovable. Then I got fired out of leading that growth function where I became an IC and we tried the decentralized model that every company has to try with growth. And now we're rebuilding the function but I'm staying as an IC. So that is being built separately next to me on the side. And most of my time now is not spent in those meetings. Cross-functional collaboration hell. And it's actually spent building.
And there's something really special about that especially with so many of us that got to a leadership levels because we were so good at our craft. Yet the path to graduate to the next level has meant people management. At least that has meant for me. And I've been conditioned so much about it that going back to it has been really turbulent journey but very refreshing as well.
But let's talk about how our careers have been built in the past and what is changing right now. The ladder was built with an old constraint that more impact that you can have equals more people underneath you. Does anybody feel that that was true?
Yeah. So we were all shooting to become a manager. Managing people was important. I still remember I was doing an interview with Netflix maybe 15 years ago and I got rejected out of the process because of how many people I managed in the past and that one, I love Netflix. I'm a lifelong subscriber, but it sits dearly. I'm still resentful to this moment because I don't think and I've never felt that impact should be judged by how many people you manage.
And especially now that equation is breaking because we used to think about it more reports equals more impact. So you think about IC, manager, director, VP is a career ladder that you had to commit to but there's only one currency in it is how many reports do you have? However, right now things are changing and how much you ship or how much you can ship, that's how much impact you can drive. So equation is breaking which is what I use the term of high impact IC, which is high impact individual contributor, but it's not a senior person with no direct reports.
I want to be very clear on that. It is the person that is able to find problem, make a decision, execute, this is important, execute on their own across all of the different functions that require to get to that outcome, ship it and own the outcome in iterating out of that. That's a whole team's charter if you think about 5, 10 years ago. Now any individual can do it all because we used to think that the deep expertise and the staff IC role meant a narrow functional focus and engineers have always had staff ICs and that was usually architecture driven but now I see it's a deep expertise with broad executional surface and business accountability.
So why is this suddenly possible? Some people don't like the next slide, I apologize in advance, but I actually think of AI as average intelligence. I'm sure we will get into AGI world someday, but for now it's still super powerful to have at your fingertips an average marketer, an average engineer, an average analyst, an average designer. Honestly, I don't know about you, that's sometimes better than some of the other teams that I had. But it's incredible to really get to the point where I know what needs to get done and I have this average intelligence at my fingertips of all of the specialties that I need to have it done.
So only one or two areas of exceptional craft are needed and then the good enough everywhere else to get it to the point where you can learn because remember everything that we're doing is not because we know what to do and not because we know how good or correct looks like. It's because we need to learn and we need to see our customer feedback and we need to see their reaction in order to understand what the next step is. So before we had an idea, a meeting, a PM, a designer, a meeting, an engineer, a review, an approval and the ship. And this is a very shortened process of what it used to be before because let's face it, there are probably a hundred more steps along that line with 3 months if you're lucky period of where you can accomplish it versus now you can just have an idea, you can build it, and you can learn.
I live in Lovable all day long. We ship to production through Lovable. I create this deck with Lovable. I do all of my ideation with Lovable. I do my calendar, my email, everything management with Lovable. Email is probably my worst, but it's okay.
When the cost of building falls below the cost of coordinating, the org chart should change.
So my question to you is as we're all talking about this being AI-pilled, we're talking about being AI native. That's only tooling portion of it. Are you changing your organizational design underneath you in order to take advantage of all of those skills? In order to take advantage of the people utilizing those tools because if you don't, you're actually not taking advantage of the biggest change that is happening in our system right now.
And let me tell you how I became one. As I said, I would love to say that it was very well-crafted and I asked for it. In reality, I got fired out of my job. I didn't get fired out of the company. I got fired out of the responsibilities that I was doing before. And at Lovable, my job has already changed three times in the last year and three months. And I know it's going to change again. And that's okay because every single time I do what's best contributes to the business and to our customers and I'm staying flexible and everybody's job is changing every three to four months. At Lovable, we have reorgs that are every couple weeks. The only constant is change because we're living through the era that some categorize as similar to industrial revolution. Well, if you're going through that type of change with AI revolution, whatever you want to call it, then you have to adjust to it because if you're not changing, that means you're not taking advantage of it or you're not going along with the times. So, I got fired out of the management position. I became an IC.
And let me tell you just firsthand that was not an easy path because so much of my identity was tied to that title and knowing that I'm managing my team. I didn't want it to be related to it but inadvertently over the last two decades that I've been in the field it became attached to it. So at the beginning for about a couple of weeks I thought, well, did I just get promoted and get the best of both worlds or did I just lose my status? Did I just lose additional opportunities in the future that I'll have coming towards me? So no team felt almost like less important until I saw the continuous impact that I can continue doing in the organization.
But the decades of conditioning are hard to shake off. I want to acknowledge it because so many of our identities are wrapped up in our titles at work because we spend so much time at work compared to doing anything else in our lives that it's actually kind of good to shake it up sometimes. So you don't have such a strong connection to what you're doing, especially in the next year or so when all of our jobs are going to change. You're not going to lose a position in your company, but what you're doing is going to change.
I don't know about you, but everything that I'm doing today, day-to-day, is completely different versus what I was doing, let's say, 5 years ago or 10 years ago. And I welcome that change. Honestly, I think it's interesting again and it's exciting, but it is hard on your identity and it does take some time to mourn that ladder that you were climbing that you thought was the end goal. But if you realize that at the top of that ladder is not something that is riveting to you, that is not something that you're really, really good at, managing large teams and cross-functional collaboration, because you were good at your craft, then maybe this is a better path and AI can help you continue keeping the influence and the status and even get more impact than potentially you had when you were leading teams.
So I used to need a PM, designers, engineers, and a lot of calendar time in order to get things done. Now I build things myself and I'm responsible for pricing and packaging in our company. So I build and change pricing page. I build prototypes. I deploy to production myself. I do the user research. I do the analysis. I do all of the optimizations. And then I collaborate with our engineers on some of the bigger model changes that require deeper engineering work. But I'm kind of responsible for it all myself and there's something so exciting about it. I don't know about you all. We all work in tech and we all have these really long outcomes that we're going after. For example, in my spare time I love power washing. It is so satisfactory, like oddly satisfactory, to just see that clean slate. And to me, becoming a HI-IC is also so satisfactory because I can see what I'm doing back into customers' hands almost immediately when I'm ready to push it. There's no cross-functional dependency that is happening and 90% of my time is either building or thinking about what to build next. It is so exciting. I'm back to my craft roots.
And yes, it was exciting to run a team, but being stuck in the meetings all day long and waiting on some team's prioritization in order to get it done is no more in my day. And by the way, it's so easy to also just fall into the rhythm of having your time being stolen away by the meetings that are placed on your calendar versus actually taking time to do what's right for the business and to do what's right for the customer.
But you can't just declare people to be HI-ICs. When I transitioned, I really quickly realized that there are constraints in the system that had to be true in order for me to still feel satisfied in my role and in order for me to still be as impactful as I wanted to be. So HI-IC is not just a job title. It is an organizational operating system. And you need to be careful with that because there's five things that I believe need to be true on your team in order for you to be able to either transition yourself into an individual contributor role and love it or in order for you to hire other VPs or chiefs, whatever it is of the titles that people had, as ICs in your team. So I really urge you to look at these.
So number one and this is the most important one. The only way that I can still be impactful is if I have all of the information at my fingertips in order to make the right decision. However, our organizational designs currently gate information by design. You have all of these layers of people filtering information down to individual contributors. Well, that can be no more. You have to trust your people. You have to trust your employees. And you have to flow that information through. Now, obviously that requires fewer management layers. So, at Lovable, we don't have titles. We just have individual contributors, we have leads, and then we have heads of the department. But there's no managers, there's no directors, there's no such thing as a VP walking into the room and everybody has to listen or the highest paid opinion that wins. There's no such thing. Everybody's on the same level with just a really high level of who, if there's an issue, it should ladder up to in order to scale it. We have agents that live in Slack and each team has their own agent and each agent has a mom or a dad or parents that are training that agent and if you have any questions about what that team's doing or any documentation that you need, you can just discuss it with an agent. So there's very important path here of accessibility to information as well.
Then the authority has to travel with accountability. If I'm going to be a HI-IC, I'm not going to be okay if I have to travel a decision five times up and down in order to get anything done. So team has to trust me. Executive team has to trust me. I actually still sit on the executive team even though I'm an individual contributor. But I have an ability to decide, to ship, and most importantly to fail. And guess what? I failed many times at Lovable. From the outside, it might look up and to the right, but I've cost Lovable many millions of dollars in my failed experiments, but we've learned such important information out of them that it helped us unlock more growth as a result. But we allow everybody to have meaningful failures that yes do impact revenue and nobody freaks out about it as long as there's learning that can be propagated through.
And then the scope isn't defined by function. So I'm not just doing growth. Sometimes I ship core features. Sometimes I get involved in marketing. Sometimes I go back to my growth product stuff. So it's kind of all of it. But remember, one does not simply own it if it needs six approvals. So if it's cheaper to try than to debate, make sure that when experiments are cheap, approval chains are the expensive part. So really think about organizing your team this way.
As well as decoupling pay and status from headcount. This one is important. It is so ingrained in us that if we want to get more pay, we have to get promoted to manager to director to VP. When I moved into my HI-IC, I did not have a change in my pay grade. In fact, I believe that if we truly believe in this AI change that is happening in all our lives, then ICs should get paid more than managers because as an IC, you can drive more outcome and impact than the manager in the old system. Otherwise everybody rationally becomes a manager and there's managers everywhere and most importantly there's lots of terrible managers everywhere, because all of us had one through our career. We're not going to name any names but a lot of those people never wanted to be a manager either. They were pushed into that ladder and maybe for once we don't have to do that anymore.
And most importantly, I actually ran a survey and we saw that 42 out of 51 people managers actually wanted to go back into IC role. I actually think that I don't know how I can be an effective manager if I don't know what IC work looks like anymore. And IC work now looks so different versus what it looked like 5 to 10 years ago. I feel like I need to experience it in order to be an effective manager in the future. So I love to take this opportunity to actually learn what one person could do. So if I am going to lead a team in the future, I can direct them appropriately.
But money and status have to be equal. And that's important because that's why most of us go into management, because we still want to get paid. Let's not forget we're in a capitalism world and we're not doing this for free. And if you want to attract those people, be expected to actually pay them those leadership level salaries. But do expect leadership level outcomes out of them as well. Don't ask people to do both. I've tried to do both manager and IC and a lot of people say, "Oh, I love getting back to my IC roots
while I'm still running a team." That's a huge context shift that is really difficult to manage. So some people can do it and I applaud you if you're one of those people. Overall, it's very difficult. You're either a manager or you're an individual contributor, and you can do a lot of context changes in your individual role and then you can do a lot of context changes in your manager role, but switching between the two just becomes nearly impossible.
So you have to pick a path and really think about scaling through yourself as opposed to scaling through people, because it's such a change in mentality of how we do things and we have to rewire our brains a little bit. But there has never been a greater opportunity in time for you to go back to your craft if craft is what you were great at, if craft was the reason that you got promoted to where you are right now.
Because how silly is it that we take people out of the roles that they're really good at in order to move up the ladder in a corporation? And now you can go back and you can still exercise all of the leadership qualities that you've learned and hard earned, but doing it as an individual contributor.
So I think AI's most interesting effect on organizations is not replacing jobs, no matter how sensational those headlines are and how many impressions they drive for people who just want to make waves. I think it's separating impact from headcount. And I urge you all to think about that for yourself, because right now is the opportunity in time for you to potentially go back, for you to continue having the impact, for you to love what you do every single day.
So take a hard look at your job. Do you really love it? Do you really love how you're spending your day today? Does that give you energy? If yes, keep going. This presentation is not for you. But I've talked to too many people that feel the drain, that don't feel the energy, that don't love where they are. And AI is presenting an incredible opportunity for us to find the career yet again that gives us that energy.
So management needs to be a career path, not a promotion. Thank you all.
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