From today to tomorrow
What each level of the company changes into. The person often does not change; the job does. The discomfort is concentrated in the middle, among the people whose work was coordination and translation, who are also the people the model most needs, in new form.
Four words do a lot of work below. A card is one outcome, big enough to matter to the executive team and small enough for one team to ship. The outcome board is where every card sits, which is how the company sees who is waiting on whom. A primitive is a shared piece of the company (the customer, the order, the product) that one team owns and everyone else builds on. A balance metric is the promise that fixing one thing will not quietly break another.
Engineer: From code author to builder or steward
Today
Central engineering. Receives requirements, works in sprints, writes and reviews code. The code is the work.
Tomorrow
Directs agents that write the code and judges whether what was built is right. Either a domain builder inside an ownership team, or a primitive steward who owns a shared piece of the company. Deep engineering still exists, and is scarcer and more valuable.
Lets go of: Code authorship as identity; the sprint rhythm; being the gate between the business and what gets built.
Measured on: Outcomes live and in use; consumers of what they build; balance metrics held; spend within envelope.
Domain professional: From requester to builder
Today
The analyst, the operator, the specialist who never wrote code. Knows the domain best; gets things built by writing a request and waiting a quarter.
Tomorrow
Given a safe place to build on the data they already see. Starts with a report or a small agent; the first time something they built is promoted to shared and someone else improves it, the model becomes real.
Lets go of: The request-and-wait posture; private tools nobody can build on.
Measured on: Outcomes shipped; shared things others consume; balance metrics held.
Product manager: From requirements to ownership
Today
Gathers requirements, writes the spec, orders the backlog, negotiates the roadmap.
Tomorrow
The requirements ritual evaporates, because stakeholder and builder are now one team. What remains was always the point: knowing what the outcome should be, judging whether the build achieves it, holding the metric. Becomes the domain owner or team lead.
Lets go of: The spec; the backlog as the unit of work; the roadmap; translating between two sides that are now one.
Measured on: Outcomes live; metrics held; consumers of the domain's shared things.
Manager: From coordinator to owner
Today
Coordinates: status, resourcing, dependencies, the sprint. Translates and negotiates for capacity.
Tomorrow
The coordination work evaporates, because the outcome board does it. What is left is ownership, and the manager steps into it or does not. Owns a set of outcomes end to end, runs the daily build review, owns the spend envelope. The level where "the person changes, not the title" is most tested.
Lets go of: Status reporting; resource negotiation; coordination meetings; being needed as a translator.
Measured on: Cards shipped live; outcome and balance metrics; spend within envelope; reuse of what the team publishes.
Director: From portfolio manager to domain leader
Today
Runs a function or several teams. Prioritizes a portfolio against a budget line; approves gates and exceptions.
Tomorrow
Prioritization becomes ordering cards on the outcome board. The program office dissolves into its dependency chains. Leads a domain organization (Customer, Order, Product Lifecycle) with its primitives, teams, spend and outcomes, or a control-plane job company-wide.
Lets go of: Functional turf; headcount as power; approval gates; the program office.
Measured on: Domain capability growth, meaning consumers of its primitives across the company; domain outcomes and balance metrics; spend envelope.
Vice President: From function head to domain executive
Today
Runs a large function with its budget, org design and quarterly planning. Technology is something another VP provides.
Tomorrow
The function is re-aligned around the things it operates on: the sales leader now also owns the CRM and customer support. Owns one or more domains completely (people, primitives, agent units, spend) and sits on the governance body. The largest personal change on this page.
Lets go of: "IT does that"; annual and quarterly planning; the requirements handoff; the function as identity.
Measured on: Domain outcomes and balance metrics; company-wide reuse of the domain's primitives; spend; speed from idea to live.
Senior Vice President: From program sponsor to orchestrator of a unit
Today
Runs a business unit with a P&L. Sponsors programs, chairs steering committees, arbitrates between functions.
Tomorrow
Sponsors the proof (the first domain, the first card, the quarter of patience) and stands up the governance body for the unit. Then runs the division as a fractal of the whole, with its own outcome board rolling up to headquarters.
Lets go of: Steering committees; program reviews; annual budget negotiation; arbitrating between functions that no longer exist as such.
Measured on: Capability growth of the unit; outcomes and balance metrics across its domains; overhead reduction; experimentation rate.
The CEO and the C-suite: From executing strategy to orchestrating capability
Today
Sets strategy, negotiates the annual budget, and spends most of its time on why this is late and what is blocking that. Adopts AI function by function, because that is how requests arrive.
Tomorrow
Grants the four asks, names the transformation leader, and becomes the governance body. Decides what goes on the outcome board, governs often on evidence, and worries about capabilities rather than speed. The CEO owns the vision and guardrails the platform checks against; the CFO the spend envelopes; the CTO or CIO runs the operating system; the CHRO the new roles and the ownership training.
Lets go of: Speed anxiety; status decks; the annual technology budget; function-by-function AI adoption; the CIO as advisor.
Measured on: Capability growth; speed to market; experimentation rate; overhead reduction; balance metrics held company-wide.
Roles that do not exist yet
Four roles appear in this model that most companies do not have. The transformation leader runs the control plane through the change and reports to the CEO, almost certainly a hire or an interim, because the role requires having seen this work. The domain owner is the director- or VP-level leader who accepts sole ownership of one of the things the company operates on, usually an existing leader with a changed remit. The primitive steward is the technical owner of a shared piece of the company, drawn from the best of the current engineers and data people. And the domain builder is the person, engineer or not, who turns a domain owner's intent into working things daily, mostly existing people, trained in ownership and in directing and judging what agents build.
Careers, promotion and pay
The old ladder was headcount and budget, and neither means much when building is abundant and spend is metered. The new ladder is scope of ownership and dependence: what you own, how many outcomes it produces, how many teams and units consume what you publish. The catalog reports all of it, so promotion cases stop being narratives and start being evidence. Every transformation I have run changed titles, structures and reporting lines and pushed ownership lower, with new titles to match. Managers rarely lost status when they lost headcount, because status now came from what they owned. The message from day one is the one that has proven cheapest and truest: we are looking for the people already here to rise to this, and we will train them.
What the organization evolves into
The company moves through stages, each stable enough to live in for a while. It starts functional and quietly accelerating: the inherited org chart, with people building on their own in every department and the risk rising invisibly. Then a first domain stands up with one card, one outcome board and one daily build review, while everything else continues as before. Domains multiply as the next cards pull them in; leaders keep their titles while what sits under them changes, and budgets become spend envelopes. Eventually the company is run on the outcome board, with human and agent units side by side and a governance body of the executive team, and the catalog is the truer picture.
The earliest of those stages is where most companies already are. The two that follow I have lived in pieces and in pre-AI form. The last is the destination the model describes, and it has not yet been run end to end at scale, a decision I would rather you make with a working example in front of you than with a document.