Your functional title is about to expire. Most leaders aren’t ready.
AI and financial discipline have arrived at the same moment. The functional leadership playbook most senior leaders are still running was built for a different era. It’s now working against them. The transition to General Manager is no longer a career option. It’s a deadline.
GET FREE ACCESS TO MODULE 1No credit card. No catch. One module, free.
The window to make this transition on your own terms is shorter than most people realize.
“The leaders who don’t get ahead of this transition will be forced into it—not on their terms.”
MAHESH GURUSWAMY, COO, KAJABI
This is for senior leaders who feel like the ground has shifted.
You built a career on deep functional expertise. You’re great at what you do. But the job description is changing underneath you—faster than most people realize.
The companies that used to reward specialization are now asking for something different: leaders who can operate across the entire business, not just their function.
If you’ve felt a growing gap between what you’re great at and what’s being asked of you, you’re not imagining it.
This course is the transition framework for VPs, CTOs, CPOs, CMOs, COOs, and Senior Directors who want to make the move before someone makes it for them.
The era of the specialist leader is ending.
For fifteen years, cheap capital and rapid tech growth rewarded functional depth. You could build an entire career—a very successful one—by going deeper and deeper into your specialty.
That era is over. ZIRP ended. AI arrived. And the org charts that protected functional fiefdoms are being redrawn around business outcomes, not team headcount.
The leaders who see this shift clearly have a window. The ones who don’t will find the decision made for them.
WHAT CHANGED, AND WHEN
The ZIRP era built six assumptions into how you lead.
Cheap capital funded headcount growth, rewarded specialization, and made the cost of being wrong almost invisible. Those assumptions are now liabilities.
Tech matured from disruptor to establishment.
The industry grew up. With that maturity came real financial discipline—margins, efficiency, and ROI replaced growth-at-all-costs as the operating framework.
AI is collapsing functional titles faster than anything before it.
AI doesn’t replace leaders. It replaces the work that justified keeping leadership narrowly scoped. The functions are merging. The question is whether you’re ready to lead across them.
MODULE 1 — FREE
The World Has Changed. Have You?
Everything you need to understand why the transition to GM is no longer optional, and what your first moves look like.
Why the playbook that got you here is now the thing most likely to cap you
The skills that earned your title are no longer sufficient to keep it. This lesson maps the gap between where you are and where the role is going.
The six ZIRP-era assumptions—and why each is now a liability
Cheap capital trained an entire generation of leaders to operate under assumptions that no longer hold. We name all six and show how they distort your decision-making today.
Why the org structure you’re operating inside right now is already being redesigned around you
Functional silos are collapsing. Roles are being redrawn. This lesson explains the structural forces behind the reorg you may already be sensing.
What the GM mindset actually requires
It’s not about doing more. It’s about thinking differently. This lesson introduces the cognitive shift from functional expert to business operator.
Twenty years of expensive mistakes, so you don’t have to make them.
I’ve been a software engineer, a VP of Engineering, and now COO at Kajabi—a company with hundreds of employees and hundreds of millions in revenue.
Before Kajabi, I held senior leadership roles at Amazon (Alexa), Smartsheet, Kickstarter, Fidelity, and Vanguard. Every transition taught me something the hard way.
I wrote the book How to Deliver Bad News (Greenleaf, 2025) and write The Sensible Manager on Substack.
I don’t teach theory. I teach pattern recognition.
Start the transition on your terms.
Get free access to Module 1 of Rewired for the Future. No credit card. No commitment. Just the clearest picture you’ll find of what the shift demands, and what to do about it.
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