{"id":5380,"date":"2026-08-16T14:07:43","date_gmt":"2026-08-16T14:07:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=5380"},"modified":"2026-08-16T14:07:43","modified_gmt":"2026-08-16T14:07:43","slug":"conscious-unbossing-isnt-just-a-gen-z-thing-im-a-cmo-who-did-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=5380","title":{"rendered":"Conscious unbossing isn\u2019t just a Gen Z thing. I\u2019m a CMO who did it"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>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\u2019t advertise it. In tech, where the data is best, it already has a name: SignalFire calls it the \u201cSuper IC,\u201d and top individual contributors are starting to get paid like directors. Most of the examples are engineers. I came at it from marketing.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=5378\">\u2018Godfather of AI\u2019 says billionaires like Elon Musk are right about the future of work\u2014but he predicts mass unemployment is on its way<\/a><\/p>\n<p>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\u2019m 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\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n<div>\n<div>\n<div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>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\u2019ve 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\u2019t miss running the org.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019ve ever recorded. The job stopped being worth it for a lot of people.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m 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 \u201chigh-impact IC\u201d: usually an ex-leader who can carry a project from idea to shipped, alone.<\/p>\n<p>Here\u2019s 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\u2019s latest work trend report, two-thirds of people using AI said it frees them up for better work, and more than half said they\u2019re making things they couldn\u2019t have made a year ago. That\u2019s my experience exactly. With AI, I get through what used to take a whole team.<\/p>\n<div>\n<div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>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\u2019m valued for how good I am at the work itself. In tech, that\u2019s already showing up in comp, with the best individual contributors starting to out-earn the managers above them.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=5376\">ActivTrak CEO: What 120,620 workers reveal about AI maturity<\/a><\/p>\n<p>What did I get back? Sharper instincts, because you can\u2019t feel what\u2019s working from a status meeting. You feel it when you\u2019re in it. And time for the thing I\u2019ve always been best at, which is connecting people and ideas. That job is the same whether I\u2019m running a marketing org or a 10,000-person community.<\/p>\n<div>\n<div>\n<div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<div>\n<div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>If I ran a company, I\u2019d 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\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n<div>\n<div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>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\u2019re back in the work, it stops feeling like a step backwards at all.<\/p>\n<p><em>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 <\/em>Fortune<em>.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=5374\">Microsoft exec on Southern Europe\u2019s big AI moment: skills \u2014 not technology \u2014 will determine who leads the region\u2019s AI future<\/a><\/p>\n<div>\n<div>\n<div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Gen Z gets the credit for &#8220;conscious unbossing.&#8221; But some people quietly walking away from management are a lot more senior, and AI is a big reason why.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5379,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[101],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-management"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.7 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Conscious unbossing isn\u2019t just a Gen Z thing. 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