This year from January to April, I’ve jumped back into shipping code myself, even though that’s not really my main job anymore.
I hadn’t touched the IDE regularly since 2018 after moving fully into leadership. These last four months we launched two products and are prepping a third, with a good portion of the commits coming from me. The muscle memory was dusty, but it came back.
At first I thought it was just a busy sprint. Then I realized this is part of something bigger called executive compression.
Workday’s former CTO joined Anthropic as a Member of Technical Staff. Atlassian’s former CTO moved to a Business Lead role at Stripe. An Instagram co-founder dropped the “Chief” title to write code full-time.
AI tools are letting one experienced leader with deep domain knowledge deliver far more without the old management layers in between.
A few things I’m carrying back into tech conversations: • Operating models must be re-examined, not just re-staffed. The question is no longer “how many engineers per PM”, it’s “what work still needs a team, and what doesn’t.” • Governance needs to move upstream and be designed for speed. • Talent strategy is shifting from hiring curves to leverage curves: fewer, deeper AI-fluent practitioners plus platforms that amplify them.
The scope of tech leadership isn’t shrinking, but its shape is changing fast. Leaders who treat this only as a staffing issue will get caught flat-footed. For me, blending hands-on work with strategy feels more energizing and effective than I expected.
Curious how other tech leaders are approaching this, are you re-architecting the operating model, or mostly optimizing the existing one?
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