Elena Verna is the most experienced, insightful, effective—and funniest—product growth leader that Lenny’s newsletter knows. She’s currently head of growth at Lovable and was previously head of growth at Amplitude, Miro, Dropbox, and SurveyMonkey, as well as a growth advisor to MongoDB, Superhuman, Sanity.io, and dozens of other companies.

She’s been on the Lenny’s newsletter podcast more than anyone else : a record four times ! But still, far too few people know her work. She is the one talking in this post.

In today’s inaugural issue, Elena discusses why going back to being an individual contributor is becoming the career flex for top performers.

Getting to the top of the corporate ladder used to be the goal. Like, “I’m a VP, I’m… kind of a big deal.” That was the signal that you had made it. Now, the real flex is going back to being an Individual Contributor.

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.

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.

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.