Most senior designers follow the same Playbook that has worked over the past two decades: prove that you can design and prove that you can manage designers and then climb the ladder. It is predictable and feels safe.
However, the world is changing rapidly. While everyone is looking for the ladder, the biggest opportunities happen at individual contributing level.
Look at the recruitment patterns: Advanced AI companies give priority to IC talent over managers. Granola, confusing, anthropic, openi, replit, meta, deep mind at Google … They throw money to what I call the ‘super ic’: talented IC people who are at the top of their game, or arrive faster than the rest.
But why? It is because these companies lay the foundation for the new era of user experiences. They establish new design patterns for conversation interfaces, create guardrails for AI-assisted workflows and develop mental models for safe, scalable AI integration in the lives of billions of consumers. This fundamental work will be the standard that the wider industry follows.
You cannot do this work with management layers. You need a special ICS variety that can learn, understand, understand and then build a new technology faster and better for a new technology than most. These are what I call the Super ICS.
Insight into reverse disruption
AI does not disrupt like previous technologies. Most technology in the past has fragmented work and led to specialized roles, and that has been the norm. Early web design split into information architects, visual designers, front-end developers and specialists in the field of usability. Software design fragmented in illustrators, movement designers, UX researchers and product strategists. Every progress created more specialized roles that coordination needed.
AI does the opposite. One designer can now prototype, test and repeat what used to be a full team. Instead of creating specializations, AI removes Barrières that previously had to overcome several people.
This pattern has appeared earlier, although rarely. Desktop Publishing collapsed Setersetters, Plak artists and color separators in individual graphic designers. Digital photography eliminated film processors and dark room technicians. Music production software changed from bedroom producers to single studios.
When technology removes friction between thinking and creating, this consolidates possibilities back to exceptional individuals. That is happening now, but on a scale in all knowledge work.
The management trap
Management skills Plateau Snel. As soon as you learn to do meetings, give feedback and coordinate work, the learning curve flows down. You repeat the same playbook year after year while your design skills expire. You lose contact with tools, stop understanding the medium that you provide for and implementation details and you will be uninformed, detailed bottleneck that you have ever complained about.
The IC track is the opposite. You can tackle more complex user problems and technical limitations year after year. Your impact is direct, measurable and essential. You maintain control of your work and growth, unapped by the vision of your manager.
How the best problems are solved
AI even forces the largest companies to reconsider org cards and report chains. Fewer people now do more work per person because of AI, which means that everything accelerates and becoming hierarchies. A manager and the IC are often the same person. There is much less “management” in general.
Even large companies that used to have had and management layers realize that the stagnation they had imposed was a result of most mid -managers who did not really add value to the process. They delayed things. The new world looks like leadership that works directly with Super ICs to do larger, better things faster.
Leadership goes directly to prominent designers, chief engineers, personnel PMS. People who can understand both strategic implications and build the solution. You cannot separate thinking from doing when you invent completely new interaction paradigms.
Main designers have often put together fast, small teams for projects with high efforts. This will not be rare. It will be the norm. “Reporting” to someone will be more about learning him at work and being coached by working together, instead of discussing abstract career development along a skill competence table that is probably already outdated.
These temporary formations deliver better results than permanent teams because they are optimized for the problem, not the org graphic. No management overhead. No competitive priorities. No politics. Just work with high trust with clear accountability.
When the project is sent, everyone has a clear track record of what the leading through Ambacht looks like. The junior designers are accompanied by someone who works at the highest level. The most important designer proves leadership through tangible results.
The skills that separate
Influence no longer comes from the team size. The old model assumed that the large design was done through coordination: getting smart people in a room, facilitating conversations, tuning on vision. But that model was built when individual productivity was limited by tools and processes.
The new model acknowledges that breakthrough work takes place when exceptional individuals have context, tools and autonomy to solve hard problems. The bottleneck is not coordination. It is artisanal depth combined with business insight.
You can build influence through work sent. Lead through example instead of authority. Solve the problems so that you left in the first place of design, on a scale that really matters.
A super IC is required other skills than management, and the bar is much higher than most people realize.
You have to think in systems while your artisan-forward remains. You must understand the business context deeply enough to identify which design problems actually relocate income, retention or user satisfaction. You must have influence without authority, design without consensus and send without perfect coordination. You must feel comfortable as the only design voice in strategy meetings with managers.
The most important thing is that you have to maintain designer disease while you work at a strategic height. It is easy to drive to pure strategy and to lose your design advantage. It is just as easy to stay tactical and to miss the bigger business photo.
The designers who put this needle in line will get started with the most complex problems with the highest leverage in the company. They never get autonomy that management tracks offer. They receive intellectual satisfaction by solving problems through craft instead of coordination.
Your moment
If you are a senior designer who reads this, you are at a decision point that will define the next decade of your career.
The platform shift is real. Companies create IC tracks with compensation and scope that the management roles holds. The market rewards traditional depths about coordination skills.
But the window will not remain open forever. The designers who now position themselves as super ICS will ride these wave for years. Those who are standard for management will see how exceptional individual contributors solve the problems they want to work on.
Influence shifts of team size to traditional depth. From managing work to producing work. From proxy impact to direct value creation.
It’s time to go back to the vessel. You have to pick up the tools again and get back into the weeds. Details are no longer low status. The “weed” is where the action is now. Even the founders talk about product details. See how often Elon Musk talks about Grok functions and the details of small details in the app that he wants to emphasize. That’s where we go.
Pick up the tools. Renew your implementation skills. Start by using AI and designing for AI. Pick up research documents to read. Learn how this technology works. Read the jargon. Learn what the words mean and participate in the discourse.
Unlike other times, it really feels like we might not go that far away from the vessel. Ever.
If you are a designer with the hunger to keep growing, to keep building, keep solving the most difficult problems due to exceptional vessel, this is your moment.
Don’t let it slip.
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