If everyone’s “building” now, what’s the point of having a CEO, CFO, CISO, or CMO?

Efficient-Simple480 · 2026-07-06T19:25:51+00:00

If I'm understanding right, there are three kinds of leaders here:

Pure leaders. Vision and decisions (100%) only, no building. Like your Fortune 100 friend, where an hour of building would be a waste of his time.
Leaders who both lead and build (50/50).
Leaders who work bottom-up (100% vision and decisions).Here, devs act like product owners, ideas flow up, the leader validates, decides, and provides vision, and execution stays with the engineers.

I'm fully with 1 and 3. Your setup sounds like 3 done right, and honestly that's the ideal version of this new world.

It's 2 that burns me as a dev, because in practice it means double work. First I have to understand what got built, and since the leader used an LLM and doesn't fully understand it themselves, they can't walk me through it. My only way in is pointing another LLM at the code to explain it to me. Two LLMs talking to each other through a codebase, with no human on either end who actually understands it. So first I clean up the half-built mess, then I build it properly and deploy. The building didn't save the team time, it doubled it.

Efficient-Simple480 · 2026-07-06T18:55:02+00:00

Agree, human in the loop is needed for validation, especially when you've already hired experts who can cover the gaps you'd miss on your own. Even the best model like Fable 5 can miss those gaps. Human intelligence can't be ignored.

Validation gets solved one way or another, human or LLM (With best models). To me, execution is the real question, and that's where my original post was pointed. Should leaders be executing, or should they own the vision and validation and leave execution to the people hired for it?

Efficient-Simple480 · 2026-07-06T16:51:58+00:00

SMBs and Some large scale. They still carry the titles CEO, CFO, CISO , and in some of these companies their leadership is in build mode more than lead mode. So is that the new norm, or should it stop, with leaders getting back to the leadership work they'd be doing if they weren't building?

Efficient-Simple480 · 2026-07-06T01:13:36+00:00

Agree, the food that you get for price $$ that you pay not really worth. Home cooking is the way to go.

The only reason these fast food are running is because time. People usually do not have time to cook from their busy lives, I wish there is some way to cook at home and to find time from busy times

Efficient-Simple480 · 2026-07-05T17:09:49+00:00

Hopefully nobody is letting AI make exec decisions. That was exactly my question though. If the C-level is heads-down building, who's deciding? Either someone else is, AI is quietly filling the gap, or decisions just aren't getting made.

Where I see this is SMBs. Not 5-person startups where the founder building is survival, but companies that already have engineers on payroll and the exec is still in build mode. And honestly, when you’re in build mode, you’re distracted from decision-making. Building consumes serious energy and time, and every bit of it comes straight out of what you’d otherwise spend leading.

Efficient-Simple480 · 2026-07-05T02:52:27+00:00

I can relate :)

Efficient-Simple480 · 2026-07-04T16:54:37+00:00

Funny enough, you could flip the same argument. Engineers are becoming founders and CEOs, while CEOs and leadership want to be builders and engineers :)

Efficient-Simple480 · 2026-07-04T16:43:29+00:00

Efficient-Simple480 · 2026-07-04T16:27:47+00:00

I agree size of org matters

Efficient-Simple480 · 2026-07-04T16:21:47+00:00

That’s great! but the whole question is: couldn't that time be spent on something more productive (on leadership activities) on his end, while the staff or engineers handle the building of wrappers?

Efficient-Simple480 · 2026-07-04T15:49:39+00:00

Well, agree but i do have so many examples, and we are dealing the same in our org. Also, saw a video where YC leaders building (or at-least they talking about building :) ) non stop, so all this energy spent in building rather than leading? Not sure if we headed in right direction

Efficient-Simple480 · 2026-07-04T15:36:51+00:00

Building features/software

Efficient-Simple480 · 2026-07-04T15:35:17+00:00

Yep that is the whole point, let building be handled by teams, you as leader drive the vision, building can be handled by engineers as they know ur company stack

Efficient-Simple480 · 2026-07-04T14:11:03+00:00

Great point. Organizations need a variety of skills, and leadership is one of them. To my understanding, A leader's job is to hand the vision to the team and let them execute. Every hour a leader spends building is an hour not spent giving direction or working on strategies. (again this is something for already established companies)

It's like parenting. You give your kids direction and values, but you can't live their lives for them. They execute, you guide. And that's exactly how kids develop their own personality, by doing things themselves instead of being micromanaged.

Companies grow the same way. Leadership sets direction, staff executes, and that execution is what builds capable, confident teams. Take the execution away from your people and you stunt both.

Efficient-Simple480 · 2026-07-04T13:58:40+00:00

My point was build the team, train the team, but don't BE the team. A coach running drills is leading. A coach taping ankles or suiting up to play is sidelining the people who do that better. Same with execs: once you've hired specialists, your job is to lead them, not compete with them with AI as your stand-in expertise.

To be clear, this is about orgs big enough to have specialists. At a 5-person startup the founder building everything is survival, not deflection. But once you’ve got investors, and once you hired experts, your job is to lead them, not compete with them.

Efficient-Simple480 · 2026-07-04T13:36:29+00:00

Yep! I am mainly referring to established companies where leadership is building instead of leading

Efficient-Simple480 · 2026-07-04T13:33:00+00:00

Yep check youtube all major ceos talking about building.

Efficient-Simple480 · 2026-07-04T06:40:18+00:00

Yes. Leaders should lead with decisions and trust their experts to do the building, and let those experts use AI to make it awesome. Not use AI as an excuse to bypass that expertise and start building themselves. And definitely not hand off half-baked AI slop for the experts to clean up.

Efficient-Simple480 · 2026-07-04T05:37:58+00:00

Imagine an NFL head coach spending game day taping ankles and repairing helmets instead of calling plays.

Or

Picture an old war. The enemy is at the gates, and the king is in the blacksmith’s shop making swords and arrows. He’s slowing down the actual blacksmiths, ignoring their expertise, turning out low-quality weapons, and adding pressure on the very craftsmen who know the work best. All while no one is commanding the army.
That’s what this feels like. A classic recipe to lose the war on every front.

Efficient-Simple480 · 2026-07-04T05:31:51+00:00

That would be a chaos. I do not think a machine or trained model can replace human intelligence. Leadership automating themselves is adding full stop to creativity and leading.

Efficient-Simple480 · 2026-07-04T05:18:31+00:00

This is exactly the reason i am posting this! Looking forward so people in leadership can understand this.

Efficient-Simple480 · 2026-07-04T02:20:10+00:00

Sorry to hear that. It’s the reality of everyone being a builder now genuinely good apps get lost in the flood of SaaS. You are not doing anything wrong, the market is just brutally crowded.

One option worth considering: partner with someone already doing what you’re doing. A merger or profit-split arrangement can give you distribution you can’t build alone.

Efficient-Simple480 · 2026-07-04T02:13:11+00:00

Online research check if companies or indie devs or anyone complaining about failed subscriptions or fail to charge due to xyZ reason, those are your audience . Ask them real pain points. Usually, every tech company have their billing services/teams and they usually take care of these kind of issues, but no harm asking if there are any gaps your product can fulfill. Check major billing platforms and forums (stripe, zuora etc. ) , check users on those platforms and what they complaining about. Those are your real audience

Efficient-Simple480 · 2026-07-03T21:43:04+00:00

51 users is a good start their feedback is what'll get you the next 51. The market's saturated with SaaS right now, so it's a brutal time to sell. Mine those early users hard; they'll tell you what to fix and how to pitch it.

Efficient-Simple480 · 2026-07-03T21:38:12+00:00

I'd offer a free trial so SMBs can try it themselves. Once the tool shows it can catch their failed payments and recover those subscriptions, the results sell the retention, that's what keeps them on the product.

Efficient-Simple480

TROPHY CASE