The Quiet Shift
They've worked out that the person who can run a whole motion alone, brief to live, and actually move the number, is now worth more than the person who manages forty people who each own a sliver of it.
For twenty years we measured a marketer by the size of their team. Bigger team, bigger budget, bigger title, bigger deal. The work that got you noticed in the first place, the campaign you shipped, the page you wrote, the funnel you untangled, quietly became the work you were told to stop touching.
That math just broke. And the people closest to the work saw it first.
This Is Not a Hunch Anymore
This isn't one founder's pet theory. The signal is identical across the people watching it most closely, and the companies are already moving.
Partner at Marathon Management Partners, has spent the better part of the last year making exactly this case: becoming an individual contributor again is how leaders stay relevant in the AI era.
Gokul Rajaram - Founding Partner, Marathon Management Partners | Former DoorDash, Meta, Google
Who heads Growth at Lovable walked away from building a team to running growth as a team of one, and called being an IC the new career flex. One saw it early, the other more recently. The signal is identical.
Elena Verna - Head of Growth, Lovable | Former SurveyMonkey SVP Growth, Miro, Dropbox
Amazon | |
|---|---|
Cut more than a third of its managers who ran small teams. Many didn't leave, they went back to being individual contributors. Sundar Pichai: "The goal is to be more efficient as you scale so you don't solve everything with headcount." | Andy Jassy told every team to raise the ratio of individual contributors to managers. Fewer layers means faster decisions and clearer ownership. |
Expects 1 in 5 organisations to use AI to flatten their structure this year, erasing more than half of today's middle management.
The ladder we all spent our careers climbing is being quietly dismantled, rung by rung. Stop debating whether it's happening and focus on what it actually means for how you run marketing.
The Org Chart Was Always a Tax on Growth
Most of the layers in your marketing org never existed because the work needed them. They existed because building used to be slow.
Why the pyramid existed
When a single landing page took a designer, a writer, a developer, two review cycles and a week of calendar time, you needed coordinators. Someone to manage the handoffs. Someone to filter information up and down. Someone to approve and de-risk the work before it shipped.
The whole pyramid was a tax we paid because execution was expensive and mistakes were costly. So we did something strange: we took our best craftspeople and promoted them out of their craft. Then we told them that getting hands-on again was "low-value work." We trained the most valuable instinct right out of our best people.
What changed
When building is slow, that trade makes sense. When building can be done in an afternoon, the whole structure stops earning its keep.
Jason Lemkin says SaaStr now runs go-to-market on roughly 1 to 3 humans and 20+ agents, work that used to take a team of 10 people. Argue with the exact ratio if you like. You cannot argue with the direction of travel
Jason Lemkin - Founder, SaaStr | Investor in 200+ SaaS companies
When the average version of the work is free to everyone, copying the playbook gets you nothing. Your edge becomes the part average can't reproduce: judgement, taste, a real point of view on the customer. That was never the marketer with the biggest team. It's the one who never stopped being a builder.
What the Builders Are Actually Telling Me
CMO for years, through acquisitions, at Recorded Future and now incident.io. Came up as an engineer and still runs marketing like one. His whole thesis in a single line: "I'm doing marketing, not managing marketing."
He spends his days building agents, not slides. Five minutes before one of our calls, he'd wired up a workflow connecting his task system to his CMS, pointed Claude Code at it, and watched it strip 52 instances of a phrase he hates off the company website in seven minutes. A CMO, in the weeds, shipping.
"I'm a big believer in lean marketing teams. Doing real work gets easier as the team gets smaller, not harder."
Global Head of Growth and Integrated Marketing at HP. She's turning her people into the same kind of operator, calling them "marketing engineers," each one running an end-to-end operation with their own stack, the way you'd run your own business.
She's blunt about what decides whether it works: "If you put bad stuff into something, you're going to get bad stuff out." Her teams have learned to be surgical about having the right context and the right data before they ask AI for anything at all.
Has sat in the CMO chair and today is hands-on in growth at Ncontracts, describing himself as "a hands in the dirt kind of builder."
Post AI, his content team didn't shrink. They used AI to build their own brain through agents and multiplied their output. More from the same people - that's the quiet version of this story that never make the headline. AI ends up building the Leverage.
The Thing That Actually Decides Who Wins
Every one of these builders keeps circling back to the same thing. While they add tools, control the headcount - the one differentiator to make them or their AI agents successful is : Context
The Catch Nobody Talks About
Jason Beddall lived it firsthand. For a year and a half his team tried to stitch their own funnel together and stalled, because, in his words, "you can get 65% of the way there but you have to buy the last 35%."
Once they finally had a single source of truth, it "has been pivotal": his whole team started making decisions off the same numbers. It also surfaced pipeline they were already generating but "didn't know about", revenue that had been invisible the entire time, simply because no one could see the whole funnel at once.
A sharp marketing leader was already winning that pipeline. He just couldn't see it what was actually making them win.
Context Engineering
The smartest people in software already named this shift. They stopped obsessing over the perfect prompt and started obsessing over context, because the model was never the bottleneck.
Andrej Karpathy called it a straight upgrade: "context engineering" over "prompt engineering", the skill of assembling everything the work needs to be solvable at all.
For a marketer, context has a very specific meaning. It means seeing the entire funnel: every touch, every channel, how all of it connects to revenue. Almost no marketer has it. What they have instead is fourteen disconnected tools, attribution that quietly lies, and a team where each person owns one stateless slice and nobody can see the whole picture.
That is the real gate on this new kind of marketer. Ambition will only get them to more agents or access to AI. Context will get them to run a full funnel.
How to be an IC today with AI
Find the point of most friction
Find the spot where one push gives you the most output, usually buried somewhere in the mechanics of the engine that everyone assumes is fine. Fix that before you touch another tactic.
Stop measuring your worth by team size
Start measuring it by how much of the funnel you can personally move. That is the metric your board is quietly shifting to, whether or not anyone has told you yet.
Hand someone a full-stack project
If you lead marketers, hand one of them a full-stack project this quarter. Not a slice: the whole thing, brief to live, with AI as their team. Wherever they get stuck is exactly where your org has been hiding a bottleneck behind a layer of coordination.
Fix the foundation first
Before you chase another agent or another point tool, fix the thing they all depend on. Get your funnel into one source of truth. The marketers who look superhuman two years from now won't be the ones with the most tools or the biggest teams. They'll be the ones who can see the whole game and act on it alone.
The era that’s fading | The era that’s here |
|---|---|
The marketer who manages. The one who measures their worth in headcount, layers, and budget. The one who stopped building the moment they got promoted. | The marketer who builds, end to end, with the full picture in front of them. It was never the fast copiers who won. It's the fast creators. And now they don't even need a department to keep up. |
P.S. We started RevSure because the marketers we admire kept hitting the same wall. They could see their slice. They could not see the funnel. We're building the context layer that lets one person see the whole motion and act on it: the 35% Jason couldn't build himself. If you're trying to become that kind of marketing leader, or building a team like that, write to me at [email protected].