A few months ago I was walking through a refurbishment centre in the evening, after most of the floor had emptied out. One technician was still under a car on a lift, finishing a job another team could have picked up the next morning. His shift had ended. The car was scheduled for early delivery. I asked why he was still there. He said the customer needed the car early because there was a wedding in the family, and he had told the team he would finish it.

I have thought about that answer often. It was not dramatic. It was precise. He saw an open loop and closed it.

That is the kind of work I think a modern company needs more of. Builder does not mean founder, and it does not mean engineer. It means someone who can see what needs to happen and help change the situation. At Cars24, Builder is the shared title. It names the way we want people to work: seeing what needs to happen and helping change it.

The old system rewarded distance

For a long time, companies rewarded people who stood further from the work. They coordinated the people doing it, translated updates for another layer, and gained status as their distance from execution grew. This was not simply because people were bad at their jobs. Context was expensive to gather and share. Large companies needed people to route information, review decisions, and help different parts of the business stay connected.

That is part of the point Jay Galbraith made about organization structure: it helps process information under uncertainty. Over time, we turned distance from the problem into a ladder. The person closest to the customer could sit below the person explaining the customer. The person writing code could sit below the person turning it into a roadmap update for someone who no longer needed to know the code.

That structure was useful in some ways. But the cost of gathering, moving, and acting on context is changing. If people can see the state of a business more directly, and if messy information no longer has to pass through several human summaries, then pure coordination becomes less valuable. It does not become worthless. The person closest to a problem can matter more when they also have the context and ability to act. The technician who finishes the car, the sales operator who calls back when the first answer did not help, and the engineer who fixes a strain before it becomes an outage are doing different jobs. They share a willingness to see the work through.

Responsibility still matters

An argument for Builders can sound like an argument against management. That is not what I mean. Companies still need judgment, standards, coaching, conflict resolution, and choices about where to put resources. People need to know who can make which decisions. What is losing value is coordination theater: chase emails, status decks, and updates reformatted for another layer.

People who take on wider responsibility should help the organization work better. In Flatland, that is stewardship, not higher rank. A Steward carries more responsibility for the whole system. Greater surface area does not give someone greater status. It gives them greater stewardship. People may take temporary authority over a particular problem or decision. That does not create a standing class of leaders.

Titles can still communicate useful information about responsibility and decision rights. But when a title decides who gets context, who gets heard, or whose judgment counts before anyone has looked at the problem, it has become a gate. Strong companies should remove gates that no longer help the work. The customer does not care how elegant the escalation path looked. The customer cares whether the issue was resolved.

Agency means carrying the outcome

A company that values Builders cannot treat work as more important just because it has moved farther from the consequences. If two people close loops that matter, they are doing different work, not holding different kinds of dignity. Many companies say they value ownership but keep rewarding status. People doing essential work can feel that gap before anyone names it.

There is a cost to real agency. If the call was yours and the outcome was poor, you cannot hide behind someone else's decision. The broken version belongs to you too. It becomes harder to say, "It was not my job," even if that is technically true. Carrying the consequence is part of ownership.

Autonomy without responsibility is a slogan. The two come together in practice. Builder is not a motivational label. It describes a way of working with less reliance on permission and more responsibility for what happens next. That can feel energizing. It can also feel difficult. Both responses are real. A company needs to make space for people to learn how to carry that responsibility, with the context and support the work requires.

As coordination gets cheaper, people who can move a problem forward may create more value. AI can help by making context easier to gather and share. The point is not to remove every layer or move every decision outward. It is to place context and authority closer to the problem wherever the work allows, while keeping the structure that protects quality, safety, and coherence.

What changed when the old prefixes went

At Cars24, we removed the old bands, grades, and designations, including vice president, director, and manager. Builder became the shared title. The intended model is a company where people contribute as players in the work, rather than treating their job as supervising someone else doing it.

That does not mean no one takes responsibility for direction, or that every decision is made by everyone. It means that a title should not create a permanent class whose job is to review and rally other people. People take on responsibility for the problem in front of them. When someone needs to care for the health of more of the organization, that work is stewardship, not a claim to higher status.

I say this as someone who had to change my own habits. I started the company to do things with my own hands. As we grew, I became a master delegator and moved further from the work. My days filled with reviews and updates instead of building. AI has made it easier for me to work directly on things again. It can also make that possible for others, if we give them context and room to act.

Builder is the word we chose for that shared responsibility. The test is whether more people can understand the problem, do useful work, and close the loop.

Notes and Sources