Conscious unbossing isn’t just a Gen Z thing. I’m a CMO who did it

“Conscious unbossing” got its name a couple of years ago, when a Robert Walters survey found most young professionals didn’t want to become middle managers. Whether Gen Z actually acts on it is a fair question. Plenty of them still take the manager job, and I get it, the raise for managing is 11% versus 7% for staying an individual contributor, per Glassdoor. But the instinct is real. I know because I had it too, and I’m a former CMO.

Senior people are stepping off the management track and going back to doing the work themselves. From the outside it looks like a demotion, so people don’t advertise it. In tech, where the data is best, it already has a name: SignalFire calls it the “Super IC,” and top individual contributors are starting to get paid like directors. Most of the examples are engineers. I came at it from marketing.

I spent years climbing, from product marketing all the way up to CMO, with a 65-person team at the peak. Then I chose to give up the team and go back to doing the work myself. Today I’m the founding marketer at AGI Inc., and I run the entire function myself, more of it than I ever could with a team behind me. I write my own copy, build my own decks, and own every channel. In the last 4 months, I’ve taken two major partnership announcements from first draft to live, run a full rebrand and rolled it out, and marketed three product directions at once: enterprise, developers, and product-led growth, each with a different audience.

The pace is the part that still surprises me. When I needed a partner newsletter recently, I built the whole thing myself, design and system, in 4 hours, work........

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