I wrote recently about how mid and late-career developers need to rebuild their careers around artificial intelligence. This is the version for directors. Because transforming organizations is harder than rebuilding individual technical skills, and the timeline is just as brutal.
You have worked ten, fifteen, maybe twenty years to get here. You are good at leading teams. You have earned your position. I am writing this because what I am seeing across the industry needs to be said directly.
The path that made you a successful director won't make you a successful vice president. The directors who understand this in twenty twenty-five will be vice presidents in twenty twenty-eight. The ones who don't will be explaining in interviews why they stayed flat while their peers transformed their organizations.
The reality right now is that organizations have rolled out artificial intelligence coding agents and are watching which directors drive dramatic business improvements and which stay flat. Most organizations are going all-in on artificial intelligence. The ones that are not won't help you remain relevant in twenty twenty-eight.
If you are at a pure software company, such as software as a service, platforms, or developer tools, you have twelve to eighteen months before patterns become clear and start driving promotion decisions to vice president.
If software supports a physical product or service, like manufacturing, healthcare, or logistics, you have three to five years. But the gap between directors building these capabilities now and directors waiting is widening every quarter.
The market truth nobody is saying is that right now, companies cannot hire directors with three years of artificial intelligence transformation experience because those directors do not exist yet.
In twenty twenty-eight, they will exist.
When that company is hiring for vice president roles, are you the director with the transformation track record, or the person being passed over for someone who has it?
This isn't about job security. This is about being marketable for vice president opportunities in twenty twenty-eight. About having a resume that opens doors instead of raising questions about why you didn't adapt.
This is hard for directors because individual contributors need to prove they can still build software effectively, but you need to prove you can transform organizations.
Those are not the same skill set.
Developers can rebuild their technical skills in isolation. You need to navigate organizational politics, build coalitions with legal and security, reshape team structures, develop capability at scale, and deliver measurable business outcomes while doing all of it.
You need to understand the technology deeply enough to make good decisions and navigate organizational complexity well enough to implement those decisions. Most directors excel at one. Vice president candidates need both.
The directors who succeed won't be the ones who rolled out artificial intelligence tools. They will be the ones who transformed how their teams work and can prove it with metrics.
You need to consider what your twenty twenty-eight vice president resume needs. In twenty twenty-eight, when you are interviewing for vice president roles, they will ask how you transformed your team for the artificial intelligence era. They will ask what business outcomes you achieved and how you reshaped your organization.
Your competition will talk about reducing cost of goods sold by thirty-five percent, increasing flow by forty-five percent, and building teams that ship work requiring twenty fewer people. They will describe governance frameworks that enabled speed, organizational structures they tested and measured, and conversations with legal that built trust over eighteen months.
Will you have those stories? Or will you say you adopted some tools and people used them?
There are five specific capabilities you need to build. First, you must build deep technical understanding. You cannot lead a transformation you do not understand. Spend time coding with agents alongside your team. Not watching demos. Not reading summaries. Actually building a feature, fixing a bug, and feeling the friction points.
When your team says the agent cannot handle this, you need to know if that is true or if it is a skill gap. When security asks about agent-generated code safety, you need to understand the technical reality well enough to have real conversations, not just repeat what your senior engineers told you.
The discomfort you feel getting hands-on again is the skill building. That is how you know it is working.
Second, you must reshape teams for higher leverage. Learn what team structure works at twenty to forty people when artificial intelligence agents amplify capability.
The old ratio assumptions do not hold. Your team does not need to hire twenty additional people because you built artificial intelligence systems to handle that work. But that only works if you restructured how the team operates.
Experiment with flatter hierarchies. Figure out what ratio of senior to junior engineers makes sense when agents amplify capability differently at different skill levels. Learn how to give people more autonomy when artificial intelligence systems handle routine work.
Build the muscle of organizational redesign at team scale. The directors who advance to vice president are the ones who can demonstrate they actually did this work. They tried different structures, measured results, and learned what works.
Third, build governance that enables speed. Build governance for your team that actually works in production, not governance that looks good in policy documents.
What can agents touch in your specific codebase? How do you review agent-generated code effectively? What is your testing strategy for artificial intelligence enabled systems? How do you handle agent orchestration in production environments?
Get legal and security comfortable with your specific approach by proving that good governance enables speed rather than preventing it. Have the metrics showing a forty-five percent flow increase while maintaining or improving quality. Show governance worked because you measured before and after.
Fourth, you must master getting legal and security to yes. This separates directors who advance from directors who plateau.
Learn how to have these conversations without creating organizational fear. Build relationships with compliance before you need them. Address concerns with specificity instead of generalizations. Document your approach so thoroughly that legal can actually review it and make informed decisions.
Build trust through transparency and metrics. When security asks how we know this is safe, have an answer based on actual governance frameworks you built and tested, not theoretical promises.
The directors who can demonstrate they navigated these conversations successfully, those who can show they built trust with legal and security over eighteen months, those are the directors who get vice president offers.
Fifth, you must develop capability systematically. Learn what makes someone effective with artificial intelligence agents at the individual level and how to develop people who are struggling.
Build assessment frameworks that identify who can build artificial intelligence systems, who understands agent orchestration, and who gets governance in the software development life cycle. Create environments where capability flourishes rather than just checking training boxes.
Prove that capability development drives business outcomes with actual metrics. The directors who can show they built capability across entire teams, who can demonstrate specific programs they created and results they measured, those are the directors companies want leading larger organizations.
You must understand the timeline reality. You have twelve months to start building the track record that matters for twenty twenty-eight.
Directors who started a year ago already have compelling stories. They can talk about specific transformations they led. They can show business outcomes, like how their team ships work that used to require forty-five people when they only have twenty-five. They can show how cost of goods sold dropped thirty-five percent.
Directors who start today will have solid track records by late twenty twenty-six. They will have reshaped multiple team structures. They will understand what governance actually works from real implementation. They will have relationships with legal and security built over time.
Directors who wait another year will be competing in twenty twenty-eight against candidates with three years of demonstrated success transforming teams, building governance, getting legal to yes, and driving measurable business outcomes.
By twenty twenty-eight, you should be able to walk into any vice president interview and show what success looks like by telling specific stories.
You should be able to say you led a team of twenty-five people that ships work that previously would have required forty-five people. You can explain that you did not hire those twenty additional roles because you built artificial intelligence systems to handle that work. You can show that cost of goods sold dropped thirty-five percent and flow increased forty-five percent. You can prove you hit those numbers while maintaining quality because you built governance frameworks that actually work in production.
You should be able to say you reshaped your team structure three times as you learned what works at scale with artificial intelligence agents. You can explain how the final structure is flatter, gives people more autonomy, and delivers better business outcomes than the old hierarchy. You can walk them through what you tried, what failed, and why the current structure works.
You should be able to say you got legal and security comfortable with artificial intelligence agents in your software development life cycle. You documented everything, built trust through transparency, and proved with metrics that good governance enables speed. When you rolled this out company-wide, legal already understood the framework because you had spent eighteen months building that relationship.
You should be able to say you developed systematic capability across your entire team. You know what makes someone effective with artificial intelligence agents, how to identify capability gaps, and how to develop people who are struggling. You have the metrics showing that capability development drives business outcomes.
These are the stories that get you vice president roles. These are the capabilities that make you valuable regardless of what specific artificial intelligence tools exist in twenty twenty-eight.
Your career in twenty twenty-eight starts today. The market in twenty twenty-eight will have directors with proven transformation track records. Directors who can walk into vice president interviews with compelling stories, real metrics, and demonstrated capability transforming organizations.
Those directors will get the opportunities, the vice president roles at the companies you actually want to work for.
You can be one of those people. But you need to start building that track record today, while companies still develop people internally, so you have it when the market has options and you are competing against people who already spent three years building theirs.
You can do this. The capabilities are learnable. The path is clear enough if you start walking it.
Start today. Where you are three years from now, what opportunities you have, what companies want to hire you, and what your trajectory looks like, depends on what you do in the next twelve months.