I opened this series saying that Marketing Manager and Group Marketing Manager job reqs are going the way of the dodo, courtesy of the great org chart flattening that’s cascading from Big Tech through the corporate sector. Apparently, this isn’t only happening in marketing, although I dare say digital marketing is probably hit doubly hard due to the impact of agentic AI in bidding platforms and in-house data science.
Anecdotally, I’m seeing three reasons why traditional career ladders are disappearing: a relentless chase at the top for cost competitiveness and efficiency, Gen Z’s lack of enthusiasm for people management, and the perception that with the help of AI, people can learn new subject matter very quickly with less need for mentorship. Theoretically, AI would put the best of professional wisdom from top practitioners into the hands of every employee, thus taking the place of mentorship at scale.
And this year is the tipping point, because Gen Z is hitting five years in the workplace. It’s the point when they either are a manager… or not, and sometimes by choice.
Instead of Managing People, Mid-Senior Roles Are About Managing Strategy
As Gen Z comes of age in the workplace and embraces “conscious unbossing”, large tech companies are responding by reconfiguring Mid and Senior IC definitions to become owners of strategy without the corresponding responsibility of managing people. The pay might be comparable to that of a people manager in the same discipline, but the day-to-day work and career ladder are very different.
In one respect, this might be the wake-up call we need to advance our careers. Empowering individual contributors to move up from thinking about “doing our jobs well and meeting deadlines” to “how are we contributing to the top and bottom line of the company” means that within our areas, we’re owning decisions and advocating for our choices.
For example, the reframe from a Marketing Specialist to a Marketing Strategist means that instead of thinking of your job as setting up campaigns, you’re empowered to be the authority of what you could do to improve ROAS. That spirit of ownership provides an incentive to all individual contributors to gain technical depth as rapidly and thoroughly as possible.
Finding and Motivating Talent Is A Skill. We May Lose That With The Leadership Void.
As middle management roles disappear, the one thing that worries me most about the next five years in talent development is that we’ll lose the ability to hire and cultivate a pipeline of succession in our companies.
Not all middle managers are pure administrators. In fact, most of us got promoted into management because we were the best and most experienced practitioners on our teams. Moving from being a “player” to a “coach” or a “player-coach” meant we had to learn the art of hiring, which is very much a living skill that can’t be taught.
Keywords on a resume only go that far towards finding someone who can ramp quickly and improve the team. Hiring well goes beyond getting someone who can do the job now (which requires a proof point anyway), because your best hire, the one who will truly free up your time, will be the person who is also proactive enough to solve problems and respond to challenges on their own. Spotting these people and bringing them onboard is a skill set that can’t be learned without doing it and growing from a small team to a large one.
With the Great Flattening today, ownership of business strategy (at different scales) might be democratized to some extent. But in half a generation, we’ll end up with a gap in the number of people who know how to hire and build a team. And even though we might be chipping away at the bifurcation of business outcome ownership between “doers” and “bosses”, the divide between “Manager” (the IC variety) and “Executive” just got wider.
There’s an inflexion point of where one’s job gets exponentially bigger. In the traditional ladder, up to the Manager level, success meant doing one thing extremely well. Then the Senior Manager and Director levels were about gradually increasing one’s breadth and learning more disciplines by working through others. Now, when the gap is between “Senior IC” and “Head of” or “VP” roles, the gradual stair-step of broadening our scope of expertise and influence has become a chasm. It’s getting much harder, if not outright impossible, to make that leap while staying loyal to one organization.
Is this going to drive a huge challenge between career growth and continuity, both for professionals and for organizations? None of us will know now, but in the next five years, we’ll have to figure it out.
Will Future Leaders Come From Marketing?
Until a couple of years ago, the way to grow one’s career was to gain depth in your area of expertise, then gradually branch out into related disciplines. Now, the entry point to making that leap from “IC” to “executive” is all about P&L ownership.
Marketing is a craft, and our job satisfaction as marketers comes from its mastery. We live to see great ads being launched and to witness our channels scaling. But the sisters of Marketing, namely Sales and Product, are the parts of this loop that we’ll need to understand before we can own a P&L.
In other words, being passionate about channel-level Marketing alone might not be enough to vault into leadership levels anymore. My belief is that leaders will continue to come from Marketing, but that Product Marketing, or a Product Manager stint, would be an essential tour of duty for anyone aiming for an executive-level promotion.
In Part 4, I’m going to talk about what the shift from “Specialist” to “Strategist” means in terms of how we look at the concepts of ROAS and attribution. Stay tuned!