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Meta’s new applied AI unit will have one manager for every 50 individual contributors, according to an internal memo viewed by The Wall Street Journal. The unit will be led by Maher Saba, who is currently a vice president at Meta’s Reality Labs division, who will report to CTO Andrew Bosworth.
The organization will partner with Meta’s Superintelligence Lab to build “the data engine that helps our models get better, faster,” Saba said in the memo.
The world’s biggest bottleneck
The flat structure for this unit reflects CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s broader strategy of “elevating individual contributors and flattening teams,” which he highlighted in Meta’s latest earnings call.
“The biggest challenge at ratios like 50:1 is that the manager can no longer be the communication hub: if every question or decision routes through one person, you’ve created the worst bottleneck in the organization”, James Stanier, CTO for Veterinary at Nordhealth tells LeadDev.
He argues that this approach requires a cultural shift where individuals are trusted to speak up, make decisions on their own, and solve issues without seeking approval.
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“When one person is responsible for dozens, decision-making has to be genuinely distributed: the manager’s job becomes deciding which decisions they need to be involved in and making sure the rest happen well without them,” Stanier added.
“Practically, you need strong ownership structures like Directly Responsible Individuals so that accountability sits with the people closest to the work, async-first communication so information doesn’t get trapped, and a manager who is ruthless about going deep on the two or three most critical things rather than staying shallow across 50.”
In a structure like this, the managers who excel tend to step back from trying to oversee every detail and concentrate on where they add real value – guiding direction, making tough decisions, and shaping the culture.
