Is Every Hire a Builder or a Grower

There is an iconic scene in Moneyball where Billy Beane sits at a drab boardroom table, completely surrounded by old-school baseball scouts. They are debating subjective aesthetics, tracking useless legacy data points, and bloating the payroll with players who “look the part.”

Billy realizes the entire industry is playing a legacy game. The goal isn’t to buy players; it’s to buy wins. And to buy wins, you need runs. The game, when ruthlessly simplified, comes down to a single metric: Do they get on base? Everything else is just expensive friction.

The Only Two Roles Left

We are watching that exact same boardroom scene play out across the entire tech economy right now. The game has fundamentally changed. This year alone, we’ve seen over 113,000 tech workers lose their jobs, and the stories coming out of places like Meta or Cloudflare feel like a real turning point.

Cloudflare’s CEO, Matthew Prince, recently made a point in a widely shared Wall Street Journal op-ed that hit home for a lot of people. He talked about how we’ve reached a stage where we only really need two types of people to move the needle: those who build, and those who sell.

The layoffs hitting the wires today only confirm that this isn’t a temporary market correction; it’s a permanent structural rewrite of what an organization actually is. Just this morning, ClickUp’s leadership made a sweeping organizational announcement highlighting that in a modern, automated tech stack, every single role must either directly build the product or directly create revenue. If you aren’t doing one of those two things, the corporate machine no longer has a use for you.

It’s a brutal way to categorize human talent, but it’s the reality we’re living in. AI has become incredibly good at being what Prince called a “measurer”—someone who spends their day auditing, reporting, and managing the scaffolding that helps a company function.

In an AI-native company, there are exactly two roles left. If you are not doing one of these two things, you might be out of work soon.

The Builders: Creating the Product

Builders are the engine of the modern company. Their entire existence is dedicated to creating intellectual property and bringing the foundational asset of the enterprise to life. They aren’t the legacy engineers of a decade ago who required massive product management layers, jira ticket gatekeepers, and corporate auditors just to push a feature line.

Today’s builders are high-velocity execution units. They leverage advanced AI coding tools and development workflows to spin up prototypes and harden production-grade software at a pace that used to require a team of ten. CostHawk data shows 10x engineers are literally doing the work of entire teams using tokens instead of hours in the day.

Because AI handles the tedious, administrative baseline of writing standard code and testing repositories, the human builder is freed to focus entirely on architecture, core logic, and pure innovation. If you are building, you are creating the absolute value of the company. You own the code, the product, and the IP.

Engineers who review others code? Gone. Designers who design but don’t code? Gone. Product managers who don’t know how to vibe code a prototype? Gone.

The Growers: Creating Revenue

If Builders create the value, Growers ensure the world actually buys it. A Grower’s single, unyielding focus is to drive distribution and deliver revenue to the bottom line. They are not traditional marketers or sales executives hidden behind abstract metrics and quarterly slide decks. In an AI-native world, Growers are lethal distribution engines.

They leverage precision data networks, automated outbound outreach, and advanced tracking infrastructure to place products directly into the hands of live users. Because AI handles the manual reporting, list cleaning, and metric measurement that used to bog down traditional marketing departments, a modern Grower spends 100% of their time on strategy, human psychology, and closing deals. They own the revenue run-rate. Without them, the best product in the world sits dead in a silo. Together with the builders, they form the only loop that matters.

Marketers who measure analytics but can’t grow leads? Gone. Sales ops who measure other AEs but don’t generate revenue themselves? Gone. You have to be directly contributing to the bottom line.

How to sort your own team

Try this exercise with your org chart. Next to every role, write whether that person builds the product, grows revenue, or does something else. Be honest about the third group.

The third group isn't made up of bad people. Many of them are doing what the company asked them to do. Most of that work is reporting, coordinating and checking, the same work AI is getting good at.

1. Ask each person in the third group what they'd build or grow if their current tasks were automated.
2. Give them a real chance to move into that work, with training.
3. Automate the reporting and coordination you can.
4. Make hard decisions about roles that have no path to building or growing.

The cost of ignoring it

Layoffs across tech, tracked by Layoffs.fyi, have been running at high levels for several years. Companies that wait for a crisis tend to cut quickly and badly. Companies that sort roles early can move people into better work before cuts are forced on them.

This connects to hiring for the problem slowing you down and the end of entry-level jobs. Both point the same way. Every role needs a direct line to the product or the revenue.

Final Thoughts

There will be very few of us left who are responsible for “strategy” as a deliverable. The vast majority of companies will shift to either builders or growers.

Related reading: Where Anthropic's Biggest Users Do Their Work · Hire for the Problem Slowing Your Company Down · AI Only Picks One Winner