Instagram is shifting from large teams of narrow specialists to small 'pod' teams of four to six generalist engineers plus a 'product staff' role that blends PM, design, and data science functions, calling in senior specialists only when truly needed.
Mosseri describes a major 2026 shift at Instagram/Meta: instead of a dozen narrow specialists, teams now consist of a handful of generalist engineers and a 'product staff' hybrid role, pulling in deep specialists only for specific needs. ✦ AI generated
Adam Mosseri · Lenny's Podcast · 2026-07-09 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 2:19
“What does the canonical product team look like in 2026? What's most different today in how teams operate versus 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. One we call product staff, which is sort of an evolution of the PM—a PM who can do some of what a designer does and some of what a data scientist does and some of what a researcher does.
verbatim transcript · starts at 2:19
2:19operate across Meta within Instagram. 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? >> It's changed a lot this year. So for the longest time at a big company like ours, the canonical team was something like two or three Android engineers, two or three iOS engineers, two or three server
2:44engineers, maybe a generalist, a PM, a designer, a data scientist, a researcher if you were lucky, and maybe that's about it. So you know on the order of a baker's dozen and that is a function of you know you want to have for anybody who's writing code someone who can review their code and that's who's familiar with that codebase and having these different functions that are more
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