Make money doing the work you believe in
Elena Verna led growth at Dropbox, Miro, Amplitude, and SurveyMonkey. Even she just went back to being an IC.
She wrote about it this week. Lovable flattened the org in December. Elena moved back to IC, kept getting paid like a leader, and last week shipped Lovable's enterprise pricing page to prod by herself.
That's cool, right? But basically every growth person has prototyped a pricing page with AI by now.
The difference: most of us then hand it to the pricing PM, get feedback from stakeholders, loop in a designer, put it on the engineering backlog, get analytics review, and ship weeks or months later. Elena skipped all of it.
Her line on the transition: "Did I just level up, or did I just give up status?"
My take? Level up.
Here's why. Coordination was the expensive part of a leader's job. PRDs, decks, alignment, status updates. Those existed because building was slow and the cost of picking the wrong direction was a quarter. When a working prototype takes an afternoon, three layers of approval just become overhead.
Elena has a name for this new role: the High-Impact IC. Or, HI-C. A solo operator who takes a project from problem to production without coordinating three teams. I love this. Because about 90% of her time is now building. Almost no meetings.
The skill stack underneath: pointy in one area, competent in the adjacent ones. Elena is pointy in growth, competent in analytics, design, and code.
For HI-C to actually exist inside a company, two things have to be true. HI-Cs need the same information access senior leaders had. And companies have to be willing to recruit senior leaders into IC roles. Comp parity finally makes the conversation possible.
If you're a senior leader who quietly misses the building part of the job, forward this post to your CEO.
3 resources to start the move:
AI Prototyping Tutorial: news.aakashg.com/p/ai-p…
Claude Code PM OS: news.aakashg.com/p/pm-os
Elena's piece: elenaverna.com/p/ic-wor…
The shift from Product Manager or Growth Manager to Product Builder is here. Whether you like it or not.
