Inside the Fluid IC

I wrote about the “new” middle, the space between designer PM and design engineer where a lot of designers actually want to live. I also wrote about an experiment with Fluid ICs as an organizational approach to creating a new way of finding career fit.

This is the deeper cut:
How we’re actually building it. Who qualifies, what we expect from them, how we grow them, and how we decide who belongs in the pool.

First, I need to make a distinction clear, because it matters.

Peter’s model is depth within a discipline. Ours is range across disciplines.

Peter Merholz wrote about the super senior individual contributor back in 2020, and it’s still one of the important pieces of thinking on this. His framing: seniority without people management. Someone who leads work, not workers.

But Peter’s version centers on specialization. He names five distinct types: strategist, service designer, information architect, creative director, and big-project team lead. Each one owns a domain. The strategist informs product and business strategy. The service designer integrates across silos using systems thinking. The IA works bottom-up across a product suite. Each type is a lane. A deep, specific lane. And they are a group of very senior, ideally director-level ICs.

Ours isn’t that. Ours is fluid.

Worth recapping: The Fluid IC isn’t necessarily

• the best designer on a single team

• a strategist

• a manager without reports

• a specialist with a fancy title

They’re someone whose expertise becomes portable across problems.

We’re not asking, “What’s your specialization, and how do we let you operate at a higher level within it?” We’re asking, “Who has the range and judgment to drop into whatever the org actually needs this month and solve it without a team, without formal authority, and without much runway?”

Peter’s super senior ICs are defined by depth in a track. Ours are defined by range across tracks and the ability to move fluidly between them. That’s the whole difference, and it changes everything downstream: who qualifies, what we ask of them, and how we grow them.