They want you to go back to being an IC
“The future belongs to individual contributors who can build everything themselves. Hierarchy is dead. Become AI-native or get automated away.”
That’s the message going around product leadership right now. It’s coming from the biggest names in the space. Growth leaders at vibe-coding companies are writing posts about how “IC work is the new career flex.” The biggest PM newsletter says you need to build or get left behind. LinkedIn replaced its Associate Product Manager program with something called “Associate Product Builder.”
If you’re a Director or VP who spent 10-15 years earning your seat through judgment, org-navigation, and shipping through teams — this message is telling you that was the wrong career path. That you should go back. That your experience is the problem.
I disagree. Strongly.
The bottleneck in AI isn’t building. Building is the easy part now. A weekend with Claude Code and any motivated person can ship a prototype.
The bottleneck is knowing what to build and why.
Which of the 50 things your team COULD build are actually worth building? Which ones will get killed in the next reorg? Which ones will scale past a demo? Which ones will earn engineering’s trust instead of eye-rolls?
That takes a decade of scar tissue. Not a vibe-coding session.
One growth leader recently wrote that there’s a “short window — measured in months, not years” to become AI-native, and her prescription was: block a few hours, vibe-code a rough version of your company’s product, start a side project, ask the AI-native person near you for help.
That’s an IC’s to-do list. Not one for a Director+ leader.
A Director’s AI moment isn’t vibe-coding a prototype on a Saturday. It’s walking into Monday’s meeting with that prototype, using it to pressure-test three competing directions with the team, and helping the room converge on the one worth building — all before lunch.
But what really gets me about the super-IC gospel is the blind spot so big you could drive a reorg through it.
Teamwork doesn’t stop existing because AI showed up.
The super-IC fantasy is built on hyper-independence. One person, one team of AI agents, shipping everything end-to-end. And I get the appeal — it’s clean, it’s fast, it’s controllable. But AI, as a whole, has an over-fixation on individual output. Maybe because the people building these tools optimized for solo productivity rather than organizational reality. Whatever the reason, the super-IC model treats collaboration as overhead rather than the actual mechanism through which work gets done at scale.
The wave after “I built this myself” is always “How do I get my team working this way?” How do we develop more people to think like this? How do we show instead of tell? How do we move from one person’s prototype to an organization that ships AI products as a matter of course?
That’s the adoption problem stalling AI at most companies right now. Not a lack of tools. Not a lack of tutorials. A lack of leaders who can bridge the gap between what’s possible and what the team can actually execute - *together*.
The super-IC ships a prototype and posts about it. The player-coach ships a prototype, earns engineering’s respect, develops three people on their team to do the same thing, and redirects the product strategy.
The super-IC is impressive. The player-coach is indispensable.
Your experience isn’t a liability in the AI era. It’s the scarce resource.The judgment, the org-navigation, the ability to smell a bad bet from three meetings away, the ability to bring a team along instead of running ahead alone — AI can’t replicate any of that. It took you years to develop and it’s worth more now than it was five years ago.
The move isn’t to go back to being an IC. The move is to become the leader who can ALSO play — who can prototype, evaluate, and ship — without giving up everything that made them a leader in the first place. AND who can develop a team that works this way, not just a personal workflow.
That’s what a player-coach is.
And if you’ve been reading those hot takes, feeling that knot in your stomach, wondering if you missed a window — you didn’t. The window for super-ICs-as-laeders is closing. The window for player-coaches is just opening.
If you want to go deeper on what a player-coach actually looks like in practice — the real examples, the real moves, the moments where it clicks — I wrote a longer piece with stories from eight product leaders who are living it here: “What Is an AI Player-Coach?”.
If you believe teamwork still needs a guiding hand — that AI amplifies teams, not replaces them — you’re in the right room. Forward this to someone who might need to hear it today.
Talk soon,
Polly Allen
AI Career Boost
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