Builder-Leaders Finally Get Their Tools Back

My friend Kaylee posted on LinkedIn that since her (ok, our) recent layoff, people have been asking if she’s thinking about leaving tech (her answer is, roughly, “hell, no”). It’s a reasonable question if you think the only thing tech ever rewarded was narrow execution. There’s some evidence for that. But it’s the wrong question to ask someone like Kaylee. For people who know how to build and lead at the same time, this may be the best moment in years to stay.

There’s been a tradeoff that people like us have faced throughout our careers. We had to put down our tools as we became leaders. But we never stopped building — we just built different things. We built the systems, structures, and skill sets that helped an entire team do the work better than we ever could on our own. We coached, mentored, and cajoled toward better judgment, better discernment, better taste. We never liked that we had to choose one over the other, and sometimes moved back and forth between the two. I’ve taken to using “builder-leader” to describe us.

That was always the connection between building and leading. Our craft shaped our sense of what good looked like. We applied our builder’s instinct to build systems that helped our teams do great work. And now that instinct turns out to matter more than anyone would admit while they were busy telling us to stop writing code.

The hot takes about taste and judgment are everywhere. This is not one of those hot takes. I’m making a much simpler point. These were already the skills that made builder-leaders effective. The thing that made them good builders made them strong leaders, and now their experience as leaders makes them more powerful as builders. But it goes even further. The skills that make you a successful builder in this age of working with AI agents are the skills that made you a successful leader before it.

For years, builder-leaders were pushed away from the building part of the job. They never stopped thinking like builders, but that was just how scale and leverage worked. You gave up creation so you could have a broader impact. You stopped being judged by what came from your fingers on the keyboard and started being judged by the conversations that helped your team reframe their work, the decisions that kept strategy coherent, and the systems that made other people more effective.

Even the people still wielding the tools are seeing their value change. They’re not being celebrated for raw implementation alone. We’re demanding a stronger sense of what needs to be built and relying on them to evaluate exponentially more output. They’re building scaffolding for their own work now. They teach their agents new skills, build loops so agents can track their work and learn from it, and steer the system of work that they built. That’s starting to look a whole lot like the way you lead a high-performing team.

They’re developing systems of work and a feel for how to steer a system before the cost of a wrong turn compounds. They need to lead long before they have any formal leadership responsibility.

I love what Ethan Mollick writes about working with AI. He wrote about “delegation as the new prompting” in Management as AI Superpower since working with agents is about more than sorting out the magic words to whisper to the agent. His framing captures half of the equation. Of course builders need to develop traditional management skills like delegation, evaluation, and feedback! Mollick is a business school professor. I’ve been saddled with the title of manager for twenty years. We have a stake in this argument.

The builder in me sees the other side. AI is now a superpower for the builder-leader. It’s not the “no more pesky employees” superpower narrow-minded VCs and MBAs are selling. It’s a superpower that lets builder instincts loose with the full force of an experienced leader behind them.

AI is re-rewarding the people who know how to build and lead at the same time. That is why someone like Kaylee doesn’t need to keep one eye on the emergency exit. It’s also why people who always felt a little awkward on the other side of the builder-versus-leader split should pay attention. The tradeoff that shaped a lot of our careers is starting to break down. We get to be dangerous again.

I’ve felt this directly in my own work. I wanted better visibility into what my team was doing, and I wanted to spend less money on Salesforce. A few years ago, that kind of change would have been a gigantic project that cost more than sticking with Salesforce for a few more years and alienated the team. Instead, I was able to rip out Salesforce, deploy a more flexible alternative (Attio), save more than 50% of my costs, and fix two other annoying processes along the way: order forms were no longer managed in a spreadsheet and a multi-system process to create shared Github repository for a customer became a single click. All on my own with two agents.

That’s the power of the agents in the hands of a builder-leader. The person who can see the operational problem, design the better system, and directly help build the replacement now has a completely different kind of leverage.

It’s breaking down for builders, too. Agents are cheaper to practice management on than people are. The only reason management skills were scarce, as writer/builder/leader/podcaster Dan Shipper put it, is that “you need to give [managers] a team of humans to practice on.” That constraint is gone. More builders are getting those reps earlier, which means more builder-leaders. That’s a compounding effect for the advantage that builder-leaders already have and a structural change in what makes someone valuable.

The builder-leaders used to be stuck wearing a suit that never quite fit. Their job assumed they would grow out of building and into leading. That assumption is wrong. Their hybrid profile is now a visible advantage. The leader who thinks like a builder can use those skills to gain even more leverage. Give that person good tools and they keep more of the problem in their head, make fewer handoff mistakes, and hold a more coherent standard for the outcome.

The people who are going to feel the most pressure from this are the people who only ever sat on one side of the line. Builders whose value was mostly implementation. Managers whose value was mostly coordination. Both of those categories still matter, but neither is as advantaged as the person who can direct, evaluate, build, and lead across the whole system.

Builder-leaders were always there. Now they can afford to let their builder shine.