The Rise Of the General Manager
Your functional title has an expiration date
I hate doing predictions. In fact, I prefer making fun of people making predictions because most of them turn out to be wrong anyway. I distinctly remember the tagline on the Founder Fund website that said, “We all wanted flying cars, we got 140 characters”. But I am going to make an exception and make a prediction. I predict that the most prevalent leadership role in tech in the next five years, or maybe even less, will be the general manager. Or put it another way, in the next five years, the specialist leader role will go the way of the dodo. The rest of this post is about why I am making the prediction, what a general manager actually is, and what you can start doing now to rewire yourself for a future that is rapidly hurtling towards us.
The biggest reason I am comfortable making this prediction is that the future is already here, to some extent. Companies are increasingly combining multiple functional leadership and executive roles into one unified role. CPTO (product+engineering executive) searches have surged 110%. Cost is one minor aspect of the reasoning, but the bigger driver is that combined org structures increase the decision-making velocity of teams. I have written extensively about how the speed of decision-making is the single largest drag on teams when it comes to moving quickly and getting things done. Hybrid executive roles like the CPTO almost completely remove that friction, and companies are leaning in. So why are these roles slowly but surely gaining popularity? For that, we have to go back in time, just a little bit.
I consider the period from 2009 to 2023 the golden era of tech. Contrary to popular belief, unlike financial institutions, tech companies largely escaped the financial crisis. Between 2009 and 2023, tech companies, fueled by the SaaS business model, cloud computing, and a new way to trap customer eyeballs (aka the smartphone), grew like it was nobody’s business. In that same period, they went from owning roughly 10% of the S&P 500 to basically owning it outright.
The products these companies built were truly groundbreaking, and they required specialized talent that commanded a premium price tag to work on those products. Between 2010 and 2023, if you graduated with a computer science degree, it was almost a guarantee that you had three or four offers lined up before you even walked across the stage, with some reaching as high as $200k a year. As the market lapped up what these companies built, so did the headcount and the spending. Between 2009 and 2023, tech companies nearly doubled their spending on technology hires. And as the spending scaled, so did the specialist roles: software engineers, quality engineers, infrastructure engineers, product managers, product marketing managers, content marketers, performance marketers, and specialist managers to manage all of the above. Having a deep specialist bench was a competitive advantage, and boy, did everyone compete.
Then 2020 arrived and turned all of it upside down.
COVID was the worst of times for everyone, except tech. While the majority of the world was hunkering down, the tech hiring frenzy reached fever pitch. As the world moved indoors and online, demand for tech products went up exponentially, and companies responded by overhiring and overpaying. As COVID became a thing of the past and interest rates started ticking up, reality set in. Companies realized that the demand spike of 2020 and 2021 was temporary, which meant the expensive hires they made to meet it were no longer defensible. Then the bloodletting started.
As companies were shedding heads, a game-changing technology made its debut: the AI large language model. An LLM is a type of AI trained on vast amounts of text that learns to predict and generate human-like language. In plain terms, it’s software that has read more of the internet than any human ever could, and can write, reason, and converse as a result. Think StackOverflow or Reddit, but without the condescending tone. Repetitive tasks can now be done by anyone regardless of specialization. An engineer can write a PRD. A product manager can build features and push code. LLMs made the barrier to entry effectively zero.
Which brings us to where we are right now. Tech companies are facing enormous pressure to be financially disciplined and get more out of fewer people, and LLMs are making it easier every day for specialists to become cross-functional. So if it’s easy to learn a different discipline, what role does a functional leader play? The answer is: nothing. That role will disappear, starting with the executive ranks. The future belongs to the cross-functional leader, the general manager.
So, what is a General Manager?
My journey to becoming a general manager started about ten years ago. It was circa 2016, and it was my first day at Amazon as a software development manager. In my first meeting with a peer (hey, Ahmed!), I asked him how things worked at Amazon. One of my questions was who his product counterpart was. His answer: “None. You are the product manager for your team.” It was common at Amazon to not staff every team with a dedicated product manager. Engineering managers were expected to put on the product hat as needed.
In the beginning, it was intimidating. Up until that point, I had very little idea what being a product manager actually meant on a daily basis, but I had no choice but to figure it out. Bit by bit, I learned how to identify an ideal customer profile, connect my team’s work to business outcomes, run customer interviews, build roadmaps, and gather and synthesize feedback. What I discovered along the way was that if you have the will, are genuinely willing to put in the effort, and are humble enough to ask for help when you’re stuck, no technical or functional skill is actually unlearnable.
When I finally started operating as a single-threaded leader for my team, it felt like we had unlocked a new level of productivity and focus, like the feeling when your ears unblock after a steep downhill. Since that day, I have pursued and landed multiple GM roles at Smartsheet, Kickstarter, and now Kajabi. And with the rise of AI and the collapse of barriers to cross-functional learning, I firmly believe the future executive will be a GM.
A general manager is not someone who knows everything about every function. That’s not realistic, and it’s not the goal. A GM is a T-shaped leader with depth in one area, combined with enough working knowledge of adjacent functions to ask the right questions, spot the right problems, and make decisions that account for the whole business rather than just one corner of it.
The other characteristics that matter: a GM understands the overall business, including the financials and the key metrics that signal health. They can get up to speed on a new domain quickly and earn the respect of teams even without deep expertise in what those teams do every day. They know how to hire strong leaders, they know where their own blind spots are, and they hire to fill them. And above everything else, they are relentlessly curious, not performatively but genuinely. That curiosity is what makes everything else possible.
How do you start becoming one?
My journey started at Amazon, but the path isn’t unique to Amazon. There is a specific set of steps you can take that will put you on a clear path to becoming a GM. Covering each step in detail would be too much for this essay, so I will keep it at a high level.
If you are a leader in a tech organization, either responsible for people or projects or both, your primary job is to act as a capital allocator. Every decision you make, especially big ones like hiring someone new or spinning up a new project, should be made through the lens of: will this investment result in positive upside for the company? This deceptively simple question is hard for most leaders to get behind, especially those who haven’t experienced multiple downturns. Voluntarily saying no to new headcount is hard, but that is what will separate future GMs from those who will be managed by one.
The second move is also deceptively simple: start showing up as a broader leader in the rooms you are already in. Most leaders walk into cross-functional meetings to represent their function. They defend their numbers, explain their progress, advocate for their priorities, and go back to their desk. A GM shows up, curious about the whole room. They ask questions outside their lane. They notice when two teams are working at cross-purposes. They volunteer to help with problems that aren’t formally theirs to solve. And if you are asking questions because other leaders are doing the same, or you are deliberately trying to make the recipient uncomfortable (yes, it actually happens), you are doing it wrong. Show up with genuine curiosity and a willingness to help.
The third move is to actually start doing cross-functional work. It isn’t enough to just show up with good questions. When I was at Smartsheet, I wrote PRDs, wrote GTM copy, jumped on customer support calls, interviewed and hired product managers, created user surveys, and a lot more that wasn’t directly tied to engineering deliverables. Pro tip: if you want to quickly earn some cross-functional credibility, volunteer to represent a sister org in a business review. Product managers typically write the status updates and serve as the main person (aka punching bag), fielding questions in business reviews. An engineering leader volunteering to do that for their team is a fast and visible way to start building cross-functional skills.
The penultimate step is to look for spots in the org that could benefit from a cross-functional leader. As I have mentioned in multiple essays and in my book, the single biggest productivity killer is slow decision-making. Look for spots in your org where decisions could be made faster if two functions or teams reported to a single leader. Once you spot those delays, don’t open the conversation by saying “making these teams report to me will fix this.” Start by volunteering to help. If you help unconditionally, good things will happen.
Lastly, raise your hand. More than twenty years ago, when I was working the grill at McDonald’s, my shift manager told me something I have never forgotten. He said, “In America, you will never get anything if you don’t ask for it.” It was true back then, and it is true right now. If you have done your homework and strongly feel there is an opportunity in your current org for you to become a cross-functional leader, ask for it. Best case, you get it. Worst case, you don’t, but you will have the skills to become one at your next company.
If this essay resonated with you, consider sharing it with your network and/or giving it a shoutout on LinkedIn!
Until next time!