The Most Valuable Role I'm Placing Right Now Isn't What You'd Expect

The most common question I hear:

"What type of talent should we bring in to automate this process?"

It's reasonable. It's also too small.

The better question: "Why does this process exist at all?"

I see this from a strange vantage point. I'm not in the room making the decision. I'm the person companies call after they've already decided something needs to change, and lately, the thing they're asking me to find isn't an AI engineer.

It's someone to remove work.

What I'm Actually Seeing in the Market

Over the past year, a meaningful share of the leadership searches I've run haven't had "AI" anywhere in the title. They've been Strategy and Operations hires. On paper, fairly traditional titles.

In practice, every one of them has had the same underlying mandate: find the bottlenecks and get rid of them.

Why does this process require six approvals? Why are three teams touching the same piece of work? What activities create motion but not progress? What would we never design this way if we were starting from scratch today?

Nobody's calling this a "Delete Team." But that's functionally what they're hiring for. The job title says Strategy & Operations. The actual job is subtraction.

The Pattern Behind the Pattern

Companies don't usually open a search and say, "We need someone to delete things." They open a search because something is broken, too slow, too duplicated, or too dependent on tribal knowledge. The fix almost always turns out to be the same: someone empowered to ask why a process exists at all, and remove it if the answer doesn't hold up.

These roles span Product, Operations, Revenue, and Strategy. The titles vary. The underlying skill doesn't. It's not technical depth. It's judgment, the willingness to look at something everyone has accepted as normal and ask whether it still needs to be there.

The Part Nobody Talks About: Incentives

Here's what I've learned sitting on the hiring side of this trend, and it's the part most AI commentary skips entirely.

You can hire the right person for this work and still watch it fail, because the incentives inside the company don't actually reward deletion.

Most performance systems reward visible output. Shipping a new dashboard gets noticed. Killing a report nobody reads does not. Adding a process is a story you can tell in a performance review. Removing one is rarely done, even when doing so creates more value than anything added that quarter.

If a company hires a brilliant simplifier into an organization that still measures success by activity, number of initiatives launched, dashboards built, meetings run, that person will either get ground down trying to swim upstream, or quietly redirected into building more things, because that's what gets rewarded.

The companies getting real value from this kind of hire have done one extra thing the others haven't: they've changed what gets celebrated internally. Some of the best leaders I've worked with explicitly tell their teams that killing a redundant process is treated as a win equal to launching a new feature. That's a real cultural decision, not a hiring decision, and without it, even the best hire for this work won't have room to do it.

What This Means If You're Hiring for This Right Now

Before you write the JD, ask the harder question first: when someone on your team kills something, a meeting, a report, a layer of approval, does anyone notice, and does it count for anything?

If the honest answer is no, fix that before you hire. Otherwise, you'll bring in exactly the right person, watch them identify exactly the right things to remove, and then wonder six months later why nothing actually got simpler.

The skill is out there. I'm seeing it in candidates more than ever. Whether companies can actually use it depends less on who they hire and more on whether they've built a system that rewards subtraction at all.