“Conscious unbossing” got its name a couple of years ago, when a Robert Walters survey found most young professionals didn’t want to become middle managers. Whether Gen Z actually acts on it is a fair question. Plenty of them still take the manager job, and I get it, the raise for managing is 11% versus 7% for staying an individual contributor, per Glassdoor. But the instinct is real. I know because I had it too, and I’m a former CMO.
Senior people are stepping off the management track and going back to doing the work themselves. From the outside it looks like a demotion, so people don’t advertise it. In tech, where the data is best, it already has a name: SignalFire calls it the “Super IC,” and top individual contributors are starting to get paid like directors. Most of the examples are engineers. I came at it from marketing.
I spent years climbing, from product marketing all the way up to CMO, with a 65-person team at the peak. Then I chose to give up the team and go back to doing the work myself. Today I’m the founding marketer at AGI Inc., and I run the entire function myself, more of it than I ever could with a team behind me. I write my own copy, build my own decks, and own every channel. In the last 4 months, I’ve taken two major partnership announcements from first draft to live, run a full rebrand and rolled it out, and marketed three product directions at once: enterprise, developers, and product-led growth, each with a different audience.
The pace is the part that still surprises me. When I needed a partner newsletter recently, I built the whole thing myself, design and system, in 4 hours, work that used to mean a brief, a designer, and a week of waiting. I’ve run 16 events in the last three months, 10 of my own and 6 co-hosted with partners, each of which used to take a team of three or four, and one of them brought in 4 new hires. I don’t miss running the org.
Managers everywhere seem to be feeling some version of this. Gallup measured manager engagement falling from 27% to 22% in a single year, the biggest one-year drop they’ve ever recorded. The job stopped being worth it for a lot of people.
I’m not the only one who made this move in public. Elena Verna, one of the best-known growth leaders in tech, gave up the head of growth role at Lovable late last year to go back to hands-on work. Then she shipped an enterprise pricing page by herself, in hours. That page used to take a product manager, a designer, and an engineering team. She has a name for people like us, the “high-impact IC”: usually an ex-leader who can carry a project from idea to shipped, alone.
Here’s what changed. The old career math said your worth scaled with your headcount, because you needed the bodies to get anything done. AI broke that. In Microsoft’s latest work trend report, two-thirds of people using AI said it frees them up for better work, and more than half said they’re making things they couldn’t have made a year ago. That’s my experience exactly. With AI, I get through what used to take a whole team.
Early in your career, the raise data is right, and becoming a manager is still the fastest way to get paid more. At the senior level that stops being true. I used to be valued for how many people reported to me. Now I’m valued for how good I am at the work itself. In tech, that’s already showing up in comp, with the best individual contributors starting to out-earn the managers above them.
What did I get back? Sharper instincts, because you can’t feel what’s working from a status meeting. You feel it when you’re in it. And time for the thing I’ve always been best at, which is connecting people and ideas. That job is the same whether I’m running a marketing org or a 10,000-person community.
The same AI that lets me skip a management layer also lets me skip the junior hire. The grunt work I used to hand a 23-year-old is the work AI does now, and that grunt work was how the 23-year-old learned the job. PwC found entry-level roles in AI-heavy fields are seven times more likely to ask for senior skills. New-grad hiring in tech is down about 65% since 2019, and marketing hiring is down 36%, per SignalFire. Stanford’s payroll data shows early-career workers in the most exposed jobs down 16%. Running lean works for me. The 23-year-old never gets the chance to learn.
If I ran a company, I’d stop treating management as the only way up. Some of your best people would rather stay in the work than run a team, and now they actually can, so give them a senior track that pays and carries real weight. And I’d rebuild the bottom rung on purpose. Hire young people to run the AI, check it, direct it, catch what it gets wrong, so they build judgment in a couple of years instead of ten. Otherwise, you save money now and have no one to promote later.
Gen Z gave this a name, but people much further into their careers are making the same choice, to do the work instead of managing it. And once you’re back in the work, it stops feeling like a step backwards at all.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
Juliana Chyzhova is a GTM strategist with a decade of experience marketing AI products: at Skylum (Luminar), Aftershoot, and now AGI Inc. She co-founded Catalyst Bay, a 10,000-member SF community of founders, operators, and investors, and runs it as a real go-to-market channel. Its stages have featured speakers from OpenAI, Anthropic, JP Morgan, SVB, Deel, Respeecher, and Liquid AI. Across 2026 events: 85,000+ impressions and 3,600+ signups. She created the Audience-Led Launch framework.
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