The standard career progression in tech has a strange habit of pulling you away from the craft.
Like many people in tech, I started my career as an individual contributor. I was a Product Designer, getting my hands dirty, directly shaping products, and feeling the immediate impact of my decisions.
But as the startups I worked for grew and the industry matured, I took what seemed like the natural next step. I moved into management, eventually leading product design departments across several startups.
And as I climbed that ladder, my relationship with the work shifted. Building the product was still part of my job, but it took a much smaller slice of my attention. My focus moved toward the longer-term vision—and on building the organization so other people could do the day-to-day building.
My days became consumed by the machinery of orchestration. I was managing roadmaps, resolving alignment friction, and designing organizational structures so other people could build. I became a facilitator. A path-clearer. An orchestrator.
My direct, day-to-day impact felt more distant. Instead of shaping every detail of the interface, I was orchestrating other people’s impact.
For a long time, this felt like the most high-leverage thing I could do. In a hyper-specialized, highly fragmented industry, shipping software was incredibly hard. It required dozens of specialized roles—researchers, visual designers, frontend engineers, backend engineers, product managers—and a massive amount of communication overhead to keep them aligned. The manager was the human glue holding the fragmented pieces together.
We were necessary because the system was inefficient.
For a while, I thought the only way out of this trap was to distance myself from the tech industry entirely. I started trying to launch new ventures by myself, looking into smaller, highly focused setups to recapture that high level of agency and impact. I’d convinced myself that I simply wasn’t a fit for a scaling, mature company anymore—that I had to carve out my own quiet corner just to enjoy the work.
Then, I joined Helsing.
Suddenly, I found myself in a high-agency team with a surreal density of talent—operating inside a collective reality distortion field. We didn’t hide behind committees, alignment slides, or layered management. When you put exceptionally capable people in a room and let them own their work end-to-end, the overhead of coordination evaporates. You realize that managers who exist to run processes are no longer facilitators—they are friction.
And when LLMs arrived, they made this transition irreversible.
By erasing the technical and production barriers that used to force people into narrow specializations, LLMs gave every builder an infinite department of execution. A single designer can now conceive an idea, model the behavior, design the interface, and write the code in days.
And as the team's agency grows, the manager's role begins to dissolve.
If a builder can self-direct, prototype, and validate their ideas in days, they don't need an orchestrator to coordinate handoffs. They don't need a head of department to manage a rigid, top-down roadmap, because the roadmap is being discovered in real time through working code.
When you give exceptionally capable people this level of individual agency, traditional management becomes a bottleneck. They don't need someone managing their hours or their tickets. They just need a clear compass and an unyielding standard of quality.
This leaves the traditional middle manager—the pure orchestrator who lives in meetings, manages roadmaps, and reviews specs—in a strange position. The administrative friction they were hired to manage is vanishing. The translation layer they occupied is compressing.
I don't think this means leadership is dead. But it means the nature of leadership has inverted.
We are moving away from the era of the "facilitator manager" and back to the era of the "builder leader." You can't just manage the process of building anymore; you have to hold the taste, set the quality bar, and build alongside the team. You lead by setting the vision through proof of work, not by running the sprint planning meeting.
Looking back at my time managing design departments, I realize how much energy we spent on the administrative choreography of product development. We built elaborate processes to protect ourselves from the cost of building the wrong thing.
Now that the cost of building has collapsed, the orchestration layer is dissolving. We can afford to stop managing the process and start making things real again.
For managers who secretly missed the raw joy of building, that is the best news in a decade.