Adam describes Instagram's move from baker's-dozen specialist teams to small 'pods' with a generalist 'product staff' role that absorbs work formerly done by dedicated designers, data scientists, and researchers. ✦ AI generated
Adam Mosseri · Lenny's Podcast · 2026-07-09 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 3:11
“What does just kind of like the canonical product team look like in 2026? What's kind of most different today in how teams operate slash should operate versus say a couple years ago?”
This year it's changing we've adopted what we call pods which are just mini teams where it's call it four to six engineers who are a bit more generalists. Uh one we call product staff which is sort of an evolution of the PM. So a PM who can do some of what a designer does and some of what a data scientist does and some of what a research does.
verbatim transcript · starts at 3:11
3:11specialized you know I think it's very different at a startup but this year it's changing we've adopted what we call pods which are just mini teams where it's call it four to six engineers who are a bit more generalists. Uh one we call product staff which is sort of an evolution of the PM. So a PM who can do some of what a designer does and some of what a data scientist does
3:38and some of what a research does leveraging um the latest tools that we have for them. And then whatever specialist they need if they if they're doing something that requires a pricing strategy you need a senior data scientist. If you're doing something that is really novel from an experience standpoint, you need a very senior product designer. So we try to build the team based on the needs of the work a
4:01bit, but then end up with a much smaller core which is more on the order of six or seven usually. And that is a very big shift that's just happening to us this year. But they just by virtue of having less people to coordinate they can often move faster and make um better decisions a little bit less design by committee. So we talk a lot about you know AI adjusting and
4:28improving productivity and that's part of it but I think another part of it is just the small teams I think often are just more effective. This episode is brought to you by our season's presenting sponsor, WorkOS. What do OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Versell, Replet, Sierra, Clay, and hundreds of other winning companies all have in common? They are all powered by work OS. If you're building a product for the
4:54enterprise, you've felt the pain of integrating single signon, skim, arbback, audit logs, and other features required by large companies. work OS turns those deal blockers into drop-in APIs with a modern developer platform built specifically for B2B SAS. [music] Literally every startup that I'm an investor in that starts to expand up market ends up working with Work OS. And that's because they are the best. Whether you are seedstage startup trying