The rise of the 1-person growth engineer
Should you stop managing people and become an IC again?
I'm covering this exact topic with Daphne Tideman live on August 19th. So if you want to go deeper than this piece, we're breaking down the 4 growth leader archetypes and the skills needed to be successful in 2026.
A few weeks ago, a director of marketing told me she wants to stop managing people and go back to being an individual contributor.
Ten years ago, saying that would’ve been career suicide. But in 2026, it’s kind of a savvy play.
Companies are rewriting the org chart.
In the past, to move up, they used to ask: how big of a team can you run?
Today they’re asking: how much can you do yourself?
I’m seeing this shift come up with about a third of my coaching clients right now.
So let’s get into it: what is the one-person growth engineer, what’s the skillset it takes to be successful, and how do you get paid like a level 7 staff engineer while you’re at it?
Engineers already figured this out
I mention engineering in the last sentence on purpose. Because historically, engineers have had two distinct career tracks.
One is into people management. The other is essentially a senior doer. A highly respected and high-impact individual contributor with no direct reports, massive service area, and sometimes, executive-level pay as your career progresses.
In many cases, the senior doers are paid more than the people managers. And culturally - they carry a lot of influence internally.
Marketing and growth only had one viable track.
If you wanted more money, more impact, more influence, you had to manage more people to get it.
But this second option just made itself available in our world.
And unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably saw what Elena wrote back in May about firing herself out of the leadership seat and going back to an individual contributor role at Lovable.
Historically, going from exec to IC might have looked like a demotion or something that we would need to explain on our resume.
But when one of the most followed voices in our space makes this move publicly, it’s a sign this new career track is starting to become available.
Is the grass actually greener?
Before you chase this role, figure out if it’s actually the right fit for you.
The director I mentioned at the beginning spent 4 years at the same company. They went through a CEO change, a recent reduction, a couple new bosses. And on our recent call, she told me she’s tired, that she’s burned out, that she’s in this weird, toxic relationship with her job.
“I miss getting the work done,” she said. “Every promotion I’ve gotten has taken me further from the IC work I loved.”
That’s what it looks like from the individual side.
From the hiring side, I talk to plenty of people being recruited for these roles right now. It’s really a high-level individual contributor role, but with director or VP-level experience and strategic ability.
Companies want someone to come in, do as much as they possibly can on their own, and then fill the gaps with freelancers or contractors, or identify where they need full-time headcount down the road.
So it’s a senior decision-making job plus hands-on execution.
You know what good looks like, because you’ve already led the function. You’ve managed people, held them accountable, and now you can build the work yourself because the tools finally let one person cover this much surface area alone.
That combo of judgment, strategic decision making, and the ability to drive alignment across the org, is why ex-leaders like Elena and a handful of my own clients are winning these seats over traditional individual contributors.
It’s a skillset most ICs haven’t had the chance to build yet.
A few gut checks if you’re thinking about exploring this:
When you picture an amazing day at work, is your head down in the trenches, or are you coordinating at a higher level?
When you think about the work that drains you, is it the execution, or the communication and alignment?
Would you actually trade some of your direct reports for more service area, more ownership, fewer meetings?
If you enjoyed the work itself more than the communication and alignment side, this seat could be calling for you.
I cover this in more detail in the video below. Watch it here, or keep reading below.
The skillset: strategy plus AI-native execution
I have a client in this exact seat right now.
A former CMO who led a marketing team of 40 people. Today he runs growth at one of the biggest AI products in the world with almost no resources.
He gets access to engineers on a project-by-project basis, but most of the time he ships his own experiments. He writes his own code with AI tools. He pushes to production himself. On a recent call he laughed and said, “Yeah, I guess I’m the head of the department and I’m also the entire department.”
Frustrating at times, for sure. But he’s learning the exact playbook every company is betting on being part of the future.
You need 3 skills to be successful here:
Strategic decision making. Judgment. Knowing where the leverage is, which problems to solve, what great looks like when you solve them, when to move on from something that isn’t working. If you’ve been in a leadership seat for a few years, you’ve already picked this up. No prompt or agent can replace that lived experience.
AI-native execution. Actually shipping the experiments, the analysis, the code. The tools are good enough now that you don’t need an engineer for most of your growth work.
Knowing where the tools stop. Understanding the limits of what one person can actually execute. If you’ve been doing the job, you know exactly where you hit the outer bands of what’s possible even with every tool available. Being able to explain that in an interview is a credibility builder: “Here’s the playbook I’ve been running, here’s where I hit the wall, here’s the resources I’d need to fix that.” Most people haven’t figured that part out yet.
To build this, figure out where you want to deploy AI in your workflow.
My 10c: own the strategic components, delegate the execution to the tools. Because asking AI what your strategy should be is an anti-leverage move, and it’s the thing that separates you from most individual contributors.
Don’t give away the part of the job that’s your primary value.
If you haven’t built this muscle yet, pick a project you’d normally hand off and ship it yourself, end to end, letting AI do the heavy lifting. You’ll build proof, find the tools that work, and find the outer bands of what you can do alone versus what needs help, all at the same time.
You still need a system, or you’ll drown
Even if you can do the work of a whole team, there’s so much surface area that you’ll burn out in the process.
My clients in this seat describe it the same way: spread thin, juggling a million projects. One told me it felt like standing at a door watching a tsunami of work coming at him. If you’re covering the surface area a whole team used to cover, you hit that wall faster. There’s nobody else to delegate to, nobody to absorb the overflow.
Three parts to the system:
Figure out what great looks like. What’s the one KPI that defines success? Fast-forward a year or two, you got the raise or the promotion, what’s the one number you moved?
Build a short list of bets that ladder up to that number.
Make a kill list. Everything you’re not going to do right now, so you can focus on the higher-leverage work.
If you haven’t done this, step back and evaluate your current portfolio of bets against that number. Set up a couple recurring work blocks, one for building and shipping, one for reviewing data, one for the conversations that drive alignment and buy-in.
Because being a team of one doesn’t mean people will automatically give you a long leash.
You still have to coordinate with executives and cross-functional stakeholders. When a request comes in that doesn’t ladder up to your number, put it on the not-right-now list, and make that list public. Trello, a Kanban board, whatever.
A lot of the influence in this seat comes from letting people know what you’re doing and what you’re not doing right now.
The money
Growth and marketing folks have never made level 7 staff engineer money because our field never valued IC work in this way.
Our salaries capped out unless we went the manager route.
So when that director told me she’d even take a pay cut to step back into the work, I stopped her…
She makes well over $200,000 but I told her the truth… at her level, with her strategic ability and the surface area she can cover today, I think she could make way more than that.
In the past, comp followed team size. Today it’s starting to follow surface area.
And it’s not just my hunch.
I’m seeing massive offers for high-level ICs across my client base.Because when one person can own what a team used to own, the market adjusts.
I think we’re a few years from level 7 IC marketers making half a million a year, doing 10x what they were doing 5 years ago with the tools and agents available now.
Engineers have been living in that world for years. And I think we’re next.
The market pays for proof
One challenge is there isn’t a trusted third party determining AI fluency.
There’s no program or certification that an industry leader has created yet, so it’s hard for individuals and hiring managers to understand if what you’re doing is cutting edge or status quo.
Building a portfolio of proof is really important at this stage.
The formula is simple. Do the work in public. Talk about what you’re building. Collect third-party proof and outcomes wherever you can get them. A stamp from someone else beats any claim you make about yourself.
That director I mentioned at the top hasn’t made the jump yet.
But she doesn’t need anyone’s permission anymore. Elena already proved it’s not career suicide. The tools already prove one person can cover the surface area. The market’s already starting to pay for it.
The org chart used to ask how big of a team you could run. Now it’s asking how much you can do yourself, and it’s ready to pay level 7 staff engineer money for the answer.
I hope you enjoyed this piece.
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