The End of Middle Management
The nature of work is rapidly changing. You no longer need a fleet of middle managers to build something big, just a small team that knows how to orchestrate tools, agents, and AI systems effectively.
This shift isn’t speculative. It’s happening now.
Meta and Amazon are flattening their orgs. Foursquare went further, eliminating engineering and product managers entirely, and doubled velocity without adding engineers.
Zuckerberg described it as “defragmenting the organization,” cutting the latency in information flow.
We’re witnessing the quiet disappearance of a foundational layer in modern companies.
The Vanishing Middle Layer
PMs used to write PRDs. Now you have Fireflies or Granola generating them from your product planning discussion. EMs used to mediate across pods. Now you can use Cursor to introspect your architecture, navigate unfamiliar systems, and build on top of them. ChatGPT offers people management advice. Weekly meetings, status docs, even performance reviews—AI can help generate all of them.
And then there’s the project manager, or worse, the PMO. Much of that role was never about deep expertise. It was coordination work: nudging, rescheduling, repackaging updates.
If you’ve seen Office Space, you know the type — the endless status checks, the TPS reports, the middle layers managing the middle layers. It felt like satire when it came out. Turns out, it was prophecy dressed as comedy.
In a world where AI instantly generates summaries, Gantt charts, and standup notes, that layer starts to dissolve. What once required a dedicated function now looks more like overhead — process for process’s sake.
The future doesn’t need meeting schedulers. It needs builders who think, prioritize, and ship.
Everyone’s a Manager
PMs are replaced by ICs managing their roadmaps with AI-assisted planning.
EMs give way to engineers who communicate directly with customers and own performance.
Even junior developers now manage their own stacks, support threads, and growth plans.
It’s a shift from “doers plus managers” to “doers who manage”, not people, but systems, agents, workflows, and outcomes.
Case Study: Foursquare’s Reset
Foursquare CEO Gary Little radically restructured his company last year, removing all engineering managers and the entire product org:
- No EMs, PMs, or PRDs.
- No recurring meetings, no annual reviews.
- Same engineers, double velocity.
- Small teams fully own products end-to-end.
- Over $1M saved in cloud costs from IC-led optimizations.
They weren’t driven initially by AI, but they’re now perfectly positioned for an AI-native future: flatter, faster, and entirely focused on ownership and rapid iteration.
It’s Not Just Foursquare
At Meta, Zuckerberg called it the “Great Flattening”, drastically reducing middle management and expanding the span of control. Amazon followed suit: directors and VPs now manage significantly larger teams, and some managers have transitioned back to IC roles.
These aren’t just cost-saving moves. They’re bets on a new organizational model: flatter, faster, and built around empowered individuals, not layers of oversight.
It’s the model leaders like Elon Musk and Jensen Huang have been quietly running for years. Both reportedly have dozens of direct reports. That used to sound extreme. Now it sounds like they were ahead of the curve.
That model is becoming more viable — and scalable — when:
- Everyone has access to AI copilots
- People self-manage through agentic workflows
- Coordination is automated, not delegated
- Managers spend less time reviewing and nudging, and more time enabling velocity
The overhead of traditional management is no longer a necessity. In many orgs, it’s a bottleneck.
What Comes Next
- Orgs flatten. Autonomy increases. Titles fade.
- AI-native workflows eliminate coordination overhead.
- The best engineers will avoid meetings and embrace ownership.
- Talent isn’t the bottleneck, it’s everything layered on top of it.
We used to celebrate 10x engineers. Now it’s about the systems that scale everyone else.
