Welcome to the Great Reinvention

The work isn’t AI adoption, it’s the reinvention of how people and companies operate.

I listened to Nikhyl Singhal on Lenny’s podcast this week. It’s the most salient take I’ve heard in months on what’s actually happening in tech, and if you lead a company, hire product/design/tech people, or are trying to figure out what to do with the org you built over the last five years, you should listen to the whole thing before you read what follows.

His argument in one paragraph: the product management role is splitting in two. “Information movers,” whose day is framing and shuttling information up and down the org, are becoming dinosaurs. “Builders” who ship, prototype, and have direct product instincts are in a renaissance. Half the current PM population is in the first camp. The next 12–24 months will be the most chaotic period in PM history, with massive shedding and rehiring. Companies will let thousands of people go and rehire thousands of others, all AI-first, radically different skills, higher comp, everything different. The only way through is to cross a personal reinvention threshold and find a moment of joy in the new way of working.

Go listen. I’m not going to recap it. What follows is what it unlocked for me.

The split is happening in every function

Nikhyl was talking to PMs. I work with CEOs, COOs, and CPOs across the enterprise, and the builder / information-mover split isn’t a PM problem. It’s a knowledge-work problem.

The same split is showing up everywhere: marketing, sales ops, finance, HR, legal, customer operations, service delivery. Every function has a population of builders, people whose instinct is to ship, prototype, automate, and own outcomes, and a population of information movers, people whose value was routing, reframing, and coordinating. AI is eating the second group’s job description first, because that’s where the leverage is highest and the risk is lowest.

PMs are the canary. If you lead a non-product function and you’re watching this happen in product thinking “glad that’s not me,” then you’re not paying close enough attention.

Companies have the same threshold to cross

The most important idea in the episode is the reinvention threshold. Nikhyl’s point is that every knowledge worker right now has to make a very specific internal decision: I am going to reinvent my craft, and I’m going to put that above the other things I’ve been protecting. It’s not a training program. It’s not a mindset session. It’s a conscious reordering of priorities, and until you cross it, nothing else works. You can consume all the AI content you want and still be on the wrong side of the line.

What nobody is saying out loud is that companies have the exact same threshold. And most of them haven’t crossed it either.

What I see in enterprises right now is a lot of activity that looks like change and isn’t. AI strategy decks. Copilot pilots. Innovation sprints. Center-of-excellence PowerPoints. Real effort, almost none of it touching the thing that actually has to change: how work gets done, who does it, what gets paid for, and what gets measured.

Strategy without operating model change is theater. The companies that win the next two years are the ones whose CEOs look at their org chart, their process library, their vendor stack, and their job architecture and say “we are going to rebuild this,” not “we are going to layer AI on top of this.”

That’s the company-level threshold. It’s as scary as the individual one, because it means admitting that a lot of what got you here is what’s holding you back. Nikhyl calls this the “shadow superpower” — the skills and systems that made you successful in the last era are the exact thing blocking you from the next one. Shadow superpowers don’t just belong to senior ICs. They belong to entire operating models.

The equal disappointment algorithm scales up

Before the how-to: a word about the weight of the ask, because I don’t want it misread.

Nikhyl has a line about mid-career professionals in their “power years,” the decade or so when you’ve finally figured out your craft and the people around you demand the most of it, having eight hours of supply and twenty hours of demand: work, partner, kids, aging parents, health, friends. His framing is that your only workable strategy is to equally disappoint everyone, because you can’t meet full demand from any one constituency.

That’s the individual version. It’s also the CEO’s version. Every enterprise leader I talk to is running an equal-disappointment algorithm across their board, their customers, their employees, their regulators, and their own family.

But the algorithm already has a hierarchy built in. Your kids aren’t negotiable. Your partner isn’t a line item next to a quarterly review. Your health isn’t optional. The question isn’t who to disappoint to make room for reinvention. It’s which work actually matters, and which doesn’t.

You don’t steal hours from your kids. You steal them from the steering committee, the status report, the stakeholder tour, the deck review, the meeting that could have been an email. Most leaders never make that move because they’ve never explicitly ranked their work against itself. Everything at work feels load-bearing until you force yourself to look.

The reason most CEOs stall at the threshold isn’t that they don’t see it. It’s that they’re already maxed out keeping the current system running, and reinvention feels like one more thing to add on top. It isn’t. Trade work that doesn’t matter for it. That trade is hard, it’s political, and it’s the only one that actually works.

One more thing worth holding onto here: this chaos has an end. Nikhyl estimates about two years before the industry settles into a new operating equilibrium, with new rituals, new roles, new expectations. That’s the tunnel. It’s loud, it’s exhausting, and it ends. Companies that try to keep every work constituency happy through it are the ones that end up shedding thousands of employees without the newly shaped people rehired.

What crossing the threshold actually looks like at scale

If you run a 40,000-person enterprise, “walk into the tunnel” is not a plan. You can’t weekend-hack your way across this threshold. But the mechanics exist, and they’re more concrete than most transformation programs admit.

Four moves I see actually working at scale:

Rewrite the job architecture, not just the training plan. Most enterprises are running AI upskilling programs against a job architecture designed for the information-mover era. You cannot reskill your way out of a structural mismatch. The work is to redefine what roles exist, what outcomes they own, and what “good” looks like in each, then reskill against the new architecture. Do it in the other order and you train people for jobs that don’t exist.

Change what gets measured and what gets promoted. Your people read the signals you send through comp, promotion, and visibility. If your top performers are still the ones who ran the best steering committee, you’re telling the organization that the old game is still the game. Promote builders. Compensate for shipped outcomes. Make the signal impossible to miss.

Put builders in the room where decisions get made. Most enterprises have builders, they’re just three layers below where strategy happens. Crossing the threshold means restructuring who’s in the room. The CEO’s staff meeting should include people who shipped something this week, not just people who manage people who manage people who shipped something.

Pick one high-stakes area and rebuild it in public. Not a pilot. Not an innovation lab. A real function, real P&L, real customers, real stakes, rebuilt from the operating model up, inside twelve months. It gives the rest of the organization a proof point they can touch, and it forces your executive team to confront the actual mechanics rather than debate them in the abstract.

None of this is easy. All of it is more concrete than “do AI transformation.” If you’re running a big company and you’re looking for where to start, start with one of these four.

What I believe right now

Six things I believe with more conviction after listening to this episode.

Builders are the only hire that makes sense. For every seat: PM, engineer, marketer, ops leader, consultant, analyst. If the person you’re hiring can’t point to something they built in the last 90 days using modern tools, they are the old model. Don’t hire them.

Hiring builders is the easy part. Keeping them is the real work. “Hire builders” is now conventional wisdom. The next failure mode, the one I’m watching play out in real time, is companies that hired builders and then dropped them into an information-mover operating model. Weekly status decks. Three-week PRD review cycles. Approval chains requiring four directors to sign off on a prototype. Builders in that environment quit inside a year. They don’t send a note; they just ship their resume to the next place. If your org has started hiring builders but hasn’t changed its rituals, measurement, or decision rights to match, you’re running the most expensive revolving door in the market.

Young talent is a cheat code, and most companies are ignoring it. I came up in an apprenticeship culture, and I think the industry forgot how valuable that is. The people with the least to unlearn are the ones who never learned the old way. A 23-year-old who came up building with modern tools, who doesn’t know what a PRD review cycle is supposed to look like, who treats Claude Code the way my generation treated email: that person has an aptitude advantage no amount of senior pattern-matching can replicate. Diversity isn’t just gender, race, and geography. It’s age. Companies only hiring fifteen-year-vets with the “right” logos are missing the single most obvious arbitrage available to them. Pair young builders with senior judgment and you get a team that moves at a pace the old model physically cannot produce.

Joy is the unlock. Nikhyl’s “moment of joy” framing is the single most useful piece of practical advice I’ve heard on how to get people through this, and it’s more specific than it sounds. He’s noticed that every person who crosses the threshold has the same kind of story: they built a small thing with modern tools and it worked. A chief-of-staff app for their inbox. A script that controls their house lights. Helped their spouse test-market a business idea. Stayed up too late one night getting something to run. Small, personal, concrete, theirs. And from that moment forward they’re hooked. You cannot think your way across the reinvention threshold. You have to build something small, have it work, and catch the bug. Every leader, every team, every person has to have that moment. Enablement that doesn’t engineer it is wasted money.

Pace is retention. Nikhyl calls it “fire in the belly.” Year-one energy, not year-five. Leaders who still operate at enterprise cadence in an AI-era market aren’t just slow; they’re actively signaling to their best builders that this isn’t the place. Your best people leave for pace before they leave for comp.

The consulting model that built the last era doesn’t fit this one. Big decks, slow engagements, armies of juniors producing frameworks: that model was built for information movers, and it’s going to get gutted. The consulting that matters now is small teams of builders embedded alongside client teams, shipping working systems in weeks. That’s the Blank Metal bet, and I’m more certain of it this week than I was last week.

Where I land

Toward the end of the conversation, Lenny drops a line that’s been in my head since: chaos is a ladder, from Game of Thrones. That’s what this moment is. The people and companies most stressed right now are the ones clinging to the old shape. The people and companies having the most fun are the ones who crossed the threshold, caught the bug, and are climbing.

Whether you’re a CEO with 40,000 people, a founder of fifteen, or one person sitting at your desk wondering if you’re already behind: the tunnel is two years. Walk into it. Find your moment of joy. Build something this weekend that would have taken you a month a year ago. Trade work that doesn’t matter to make time for it.

It’s worth it.

That’s why I’m naming this moment the Great Reinvention: the work isn’t AI adoption, it’s reinvention of how people and companies operate.

Welcome to the Great Reinvention.

Nikhyl’s episode is Why half of product managers are in trouble on Lenny’s Podcast. If you only have 95 minutes this month, spend it there.