The Age of the Super IC ・ Hardik Pandya

Most senior designers follow the same playbook that worked for the last two decades: prove you can design, then prove you can manage designers, then climb the ladder. It’s predictable and feels safe.

The world is quickly changing though. While everyone’s looking up the ladder, the biggest opportunities are happening at the individual contributor level.

Look at the hiring patterns: cutting-edge AI companies prioritize IC talent over managers. Granola, Perplexity, Anthropic, OpenAI, Replit, Meta, DeepMind at Google… they throw money at what I call the ‘Super IC’: talented IC folks who are at the absolute top of their game, or are getting there faster than the rest.

But why? It’s because these companies lay the foundation of the new age of user experiences. They establish new design patterns for conversational interfaces, create guardrails for AI-assisted workflows, and develop mental models for safe, scalable AI integration into the lives of billions of consumers. This foundational work will become the standard that the broader industry follows.

You can’t do this work with layers of management. You need a special breed of ICs who can learn, understand, adopt, and then build for a new technology faster and better than most. These are what I call the Super ICs.

Understanding reverse disruption

AI doesn’t disrupt like previous technologies. Most tech in the past has fragmented work and led to specialized roles, and that’s been the norm. Early web design split into information architects, visual designers, front-end developers, and usability specialists. Software design fragmented into illustrators, motion designers, UX researchers, and product strategists. Each advance created more specialized roles that needed coordination.

AI does the opposite. One designer can now prototype, test, and iterate what used to require a full team. Instead of creating specializations, AI removes barriers that previously required multiple people to overcome.

This pattern has appeared before, though rarely. Desktop publishing collapsed typesetters, paste-up artists, and color separators into individual graphic designers. Digital photography eliminated film processors and darkroom technicians. Music production software turned bedroom producers into one-person studios.

When technology removes friction between thinking and making, it consolidates capabilities back to exceptional individuals. That’s happening now, but at scale across all knowledge work.

The management trap

Management skills plateau fast. Once you learn to run meetings, give feedback, and coordinate work, the learning curve flattens. You repeat the same playbook year after year while your design skills decay. You lose touch with tools, stop understanding the medium you’re designing for and implementation details, and become the uninformed, detail-removed bottleneck you once complained about.

The IC track is the opposite. You can tackle more complex user problems and technical constraints year over year. Your impact is direct, measurable, and essential. You maintain control over your work and growth, uncapped by your manager’s vision.

How the best problems get solved

AI forces even the largest companies to rethink org charts and reporting chains. Fewer people now do more work per person because of AI, which means everything accelerates and hierarchies flatten. A manager and the IC are often the same person. There’s way less “managing” to do in general.

Even large companies that used to have layers and layers of management realize that the stagnation they brought upon themselves was a result of most middle managers not really adding value in the process. They were slowing things down. The new world looks like leadership working directly with Super ICs to get bigger, better things done faster.

Leadership goes straight to Distinguished Designers, Principal Engineers, Staff PMs. People who can both understand the strategic implications and actually build the solution. You can’t separate the thinking from the doing when you’re inventing entirely new interaction paradigms.

Principal Designers often put together quick, small teams for high-stakes projects. This won’t be rare. It will become the norm. “Reporting” to someone will become more about learning from them on the job and getting coached by working together, instead of discussing abstract career progression along a skill competency chart that’s likely outdated already.

These temporary formations deliver better results than permanent teams because they’re optimized for the problem, not the org chart. No managerial overhead. No competing priorities. No politics. Just high-trust work with clear accountability.

When the project ships, everyone has a clear track record of what leading through craft looks like. The junior designers get mentored by someone operating at the highest level. The Principal Designer proves leadership through tangible outcomes.

The skills that separate

Influence no longer comes from team size. The old model assumed great design happened through coordination: get smart people in a room, facilitate conversations, align on vision. But that model was built when individual productivity was limited by tools and processes.

The new model recognizes that breakthrough work happens when exceptional individuals have context, tools, and autonomy to solve hard problems. The bottleneck isn’t coordination. It’s craft depth combined with business acumen.

You can build influence through shipped work. Lead through example rather than authority. Solve the problems that made you love design in the first place, at scale that actually matters.

Being a Super IC requires different skills than management, and the bar is much higher than most people realize.

You need to think in systems while staying craft-forward. You need to understand business context deeply enough to identify which design problems actually move revenue, retention, or user satisfaction. You need to influence without authority, design without consensus, and ship without perfect alignment. You need to be comfortable being the sole design voice in strategy meetings with executives.

Most importantly, you need to maintain design excellence while operating at strategic altitude. It’s easy to drift toward pure strategy and lose your design edge. It’s equally easy to stay tactical and miss the bigger business picture.

The designers who thread this needle get to work on the most complex, highest-leverage problems in the company. They get autonomy that management tracks never provide. They get intellectual satisfaction from solving problems through craft rather than coordination.

Your moment

If you’re a senior designer reading this, you’re 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 rivals management roles. The market rewards craft depth over coordination skills.

But the window won’t stay open forever. The designers who position themselves as Super ICs now will ride this wave for years. The ones who default to management will watch exceptional individual contributors solve the problems they wish they were working on.

Influence shifts from team size to craft depth. From managing work to producing work. From proxy impact to direct value creation.

It’s time to go back to the craft. You need to pick up the tools again and get back into the weeds. Details are no longer low status. The “weeds” is where the action is now. Even the founders talk product details. Look at how often Elon Musk talks about features of Grok and the minutiae of little details in the app he wants to highlight. That’s where we’re headed.

Pick up the tools. Sharpen your execution skills. Start using AI and designing for AI. Pick up research papers to read. Learn how this technology works. Read the jargon. Learn what the words mean and join the discourse.

Unlike other times, this time it genuinely feels like we may not move that far away from craft. Ever.

If you’re a designer with the hunger to keep growing, keep building, keep solving the hardest problems through exceptional craft, this is your moment.

Don’t let it slip.

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