CMO drops management to do the work herself—and thrives

Juliana Chyzhova, a GTM strategist with a decade of experience in AI marketing, left her role as CMO with a 65-person team to become founding marketer at AGI Inc., where she now runs the entire marketing function solo. She writes her own copy, builds her own decks, and owns every channel.

In the last four months, she shipped two major partnership announcements from first draft to live, managed a full rebrand and rollout, and marketed three product directions simultaneously—enterprise, developers, and product-led growth—each targeting a different audience. When she needed a partner newsletter, she designed and built the whole system herself in four hours, a task that once required a brief, a designer, and a week of waiting. She has run 16 events in the last three months—10 of her own and 6 co-hosted with partners—each of which used to demand a team of three or four people; one event brought in 4 new hires. She states: "I don't miss running the org."

This choice reflects a broader pivot. Elena Verna, a well-known growth leader in tech, left her head of growth role at Lovable late last year to return to hands-on work, shipping an enterprise pricing page alone in hours—work that previously required a product manager, a designer, and an engineering team. Verna has coined the term "high-impact IC" for people like them: ex-leaders who can carry a project from idea to shipped, independently.

The shift is enabled by AI. 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 reported making things they couldn't have made a year ago. Chyzhova's experience mirrors this: with AI, she accomplishes what used to take a whole team. At the same time, the career math has changed. Early in a career, becoming a manager remains the fastest path to a raise—11% for managers versus 7% for individual contributors, per Glassdoor. At the senior level, that advantage disappears. Chyzhova notes she used to be valued for how many people reported to her; now she is valued for the quality of her work itself. In tech, this is already visible in compensation: the best individual contributors are starting to out-earn the managers above them.

However, the trend creates a hidden cost. The same AI that lets Chyzhova skip a management layer also eliminates entry-level work. The grunt work she once handed to junior employees is now handled by AI, and that work was how they learned the job. PwC found entry-level roles in AI-heavy fields are seven times more likely to ask for senior skills than they did before. 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%. Chyzhova warns: "Running lean works for me. The 23-year-old never gets the chance to learn."

She argues that companies should rethink advancement. Instead of treating management as the only path up, senior leaders should offer a high-performing individual contributor track that carries real weight and competitive pay. She also recommends rebuilding the entry level deliberately: hire young people to run AI, check it, direct it, and catch what it gets wrong, so they build judgment in a couple of years instead of ten. Otherwise, she notes, companies save money now and have no one to promote later. The article notes that while Gen Z gave this trend the name "conscious unbossing," people much further into their careers—like Chyzhova herself—are making the same choice, and once back in the work, it stops feeling like a step backwards at all.