Experts Lead Experts

We are still early in the journey to learn the long-term impact of AI, but one trend that continues to capture attention is that managers and other leaders will be much less important, and that all we really need are skilled individual contributor builders.

We’ve all seen the headlines about companies pushing for fewer managers and more builders, and many of us know anecdotal examples of engineering leaders that have voluntarily moved back to an individual contributor role – most often as a software engineer.

I believe what we’ve all been witnessing is a necessary but temporary state.

To understand why, it’s important to understand one of the most important leadership principles at every one of the top product model companies that I know, and that is the leadership principle that “experts lead experts.”

This is referring to the conviction that for someone to effectively lead engineers, they must be expert in engineering themselves.  Likewise for product managers and product designers.

I used to think that this was literally the most obvious leadership principle in the world, but then my work took me far beyond Silicon Valley, and for reasons that I admit I still find baffling, many companies out there do not subscribe to this leadership principle, and they embrace the so-called “people-only manager” or in even rarer cases, no management at all.

Suffice it to say here that I strongly believe that this people-only manager is beyond terrible, but that’s an article for another day.  For now, even if you don’t subscribe to experts-lead-experts, it’s important to at least understand that it exists in top performing companies.

As everyone in our community knows, over the past three years, AI has completely disrupted how we actually build products.

Engineers, designers and product managers still exist, and I argue the skilled ones are more important than ever, but in any case, the way they perform their job – especially for engineers – has changed dramatically.

If you were an engineering leader that came up through the ranks by mastering the techniques and practices, you very likely found yourself on the same learning curve as the people you were responsible for.

And many of the best technology managers realized that in order to do the job that their companies needed them to do, they had to get hands-on with the new technologies in order to truly understand their nature.

Of course some managers did not do this voluntarily, and there were also some that were exhausted from the responsibilities of leadership, and jumped at the chance to actually become a hands-on creator and builder again. 

But that has always been true.

The nature of the AI technologies makes the new engineering role more accessible to more people, especially those with a strong engineering foundation and who understand the demands of building a production quality product (aka “build to earn”).

But we are already seeing the return of people that spent the past year immersed in the latest tools and technologies, but now feel the pressure to get back to the larger decisions impacting product vision, product strategy, team topologies, and especially outcomes.

You also may have noticed that some companies that were early to announce the reduction of managers have started to reverse that action.

Moreover, many of these people and companies were able to see very clearly that with the cost of building decreasing, their product, design and engineering leadership responsibilities become only more important, not less.

I realize that there are a few outliers out there that like to claim that all you need are builders, but as the AI Productivity Paradox becomes better understood, it seems quite clear to me that skilled leadership is increasingly a competitive advantage.

Like any prediction, this could prove all wrong, but I’m willing to take that risk.