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TL;DR:

Director roles are thawing back to individual contributor roles.

Dust off your TI-83’s because you’re going back to the trenches.

If you agree that “Head of” roles at smaller companies is roughly equivalent to a Director role at a larger company, a few things are happening. Let’s talk about the seed through series B folks.

So the role is stretching in terms of magnitude.

Oh, and you better hope they don’t show up and be all like, “OK, I’m here now. So where’s my stuff?”

Because there is no stuff.

There’s no ERP, there may not even be that many spreadsheets because the founders have just been asking claude for stuff and it lives in a chat somewhere. And there aren’t other people to pitch in as you begin your side quest to financial truth. They’re all doing engineering or sales stuff.

(Oh, and there probably won’t be another person to help you for a while.)

And while the first finance and accounting hires are expected to contribute more individually, they’re still expected to maintain a company wide awareness and viewpoint. You are involved in quoting individual deals while also calculating RPO for your five year revenue forecast and also giving the product team input on usage based pricing.

You are the same person.

And it feels… great?

“Who do you think you are? I am!!!”

In that sense you are living in the micro but expected to assemble resources for the macro of the company.

And fascinatingly enough, we’re seeing a reversion to IC work for director and even VP level folks at the more mature end of the spectrum. I’ve spoken with a handful of later stage pre-IPOish companies (+$500M in revenue) and they’re emphasizing fingers on the keyboard work at the DIRECTOR level.

Lets be clear though - I’m not emphasizing “IC-ness” as a bad thing, like you’re getting your toys taken away and sent to the gulags - more like an “it’s cool to do the real work again” sense.

And that’s a true reversion. Because when I became a director it was “sweet here’s the keys to a team of people”. I quickly learned that the skills shifted from building stuff to delegating stuff (as well as learning how to argue for more resources, because, again, that was how you got ahead.)

In many ways I think the days of proving your worth by managing a small fiefdom of G&A people is over.

I used to look at someone who was managing finance, strategy, operations and maybe even people or IT and be like hot damn they are the big honcho. They’ve got [four million dollars worth] of smart people working under them.

Now it’s a flex to brag about how few people you have holding down the fort, and what you personally built this week to automate work.

I’ve been working through this sea change (had to google if it was ‘seed’ change or ‘sea change, apparently it’s ‘sea’) for the last two weeks, because it displaces what we as finance and accounting people traditionally held as “important” for growth in our careers.

It made me reflect on some of the teams I worked on and managed.

I worked with this amazing person we’ll call George. This was pre AI. George had the option to take on a team within Finance or Ops. He was actually way better suited to do it than me. He was seven or eight years older, had seen more, and was generally just better at the maths.

Instead, he came to me and said “hey can I actually join your team? I know I have a director title now, but I don’t even care if I have to go back to senior manager, I just want to work on cool shit rather than have an abstraction layer between me and the actual work.”

I was taken aback. First, it felt like such a compliment that an older person wanted to join my squad. Second, I was shocked that he was turning down a pay bump, maybe $20K or so, to remain an IC. Any IC role theoretically would be capped going forward too. And he must have known that.

And as an IC Director he absolutely cooked. He spearheaded multiple acquisitions, was the go to person for any secondary sales, and helped transition the company to usage based pricing. He was always “in the mix”. While managing zero people.

And I was… jealous.

I’m over here with a cooler remit in principle, but def not in practice. He was doing things. He was very much more in the arena than me. In fact, I think if one of us got hit by a bus, losing him would be a bigger dent to the company’s productivity. Guy was an absolute workhorse. And he had this problem solving energy that was contagious.

George was probably six years early to this “back to IC” trend. Because he did still catch some ugly strays in terms of grunt work. Some real gross data cleansing projects you couldn’t’ throw an LLM at (I once remember him going through literally 1,000 customer contracts by hand before he rebuilt a usage based ARR bridge.)

In today’s environment I think he would have crushed. He was the Craig Hodges of three point shooting, 20 years too early to be Steph Curry with how today’s game is played.

Because this is not a return to doing grunt work. Part of the job is to automate that away. Duh.

It’s more like your efforts are now closer to the metal. Which is honestly where I think a lot of us want to be, but the allure of managing a lot more people has historically meant getting paid more (so we opt into the matrix). George wouldn’t have had to choose in today’s world.

So the IC role is NOT dead, long live the IC role.

It feels oh so powerful to do more stuff yourself.

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