What Happens to Solutions in the Megamanager Era?
Middle management is collapsing across tech. What does it mean for the Solutions org?
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Block cut 40% of its staff earlier this spring. Jack Dorsey rebranded managers as “player-coaches.” Snap eliminated 1,000 roles to make room for AI-powered squads. Meta and Atlassian are running versions of the same play.
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince laid off 20% of his workforce earlier this month. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed days later, he was explicit about who got cut: “The vast majority of those we laid off last week were measurers.” Middle managers, finance roles, internal auditors, anyone whose job was primarily tracking other people’s work. By his argument, AI now does that work better.
Tech has decided middle management is the role most exposed to AI. Gallup’s latest data shows the average manager now oversees 12.1 people, up from 10.9 the year before, and 97% of managers are taking on individual-contributor work outside their leadership remit. There is a name for the survivors: megamanagers.
Most headlines have been about this trend showing up in engineering and product orgs. We want to take a beat to consider if that same principle can or should apply to Solutions org as well … because chances are you’ll be asked soon.
AI is splitting the middle manager job in half
Start with what your Solutions middle managers actually do. For simplicity’s sake, the work falls into two buckets: coordination and expertise.
Can AI take over or at least simplify the coordination work? Absolutely. Account coverage updates, status reporting, demo throughput tracking, resource scheduling, weekly recap calls. All of that is work AI can and should be absorbing today.
But the expertise that managers hold is harder to replicate. One of our Off the Record speakers shared that they spent a year trying to build a consultative AI teammate that could do exactly that. The honest assessment was that while AI can replace a lot of knowledge share, expertise is something else entirely. It’s the nuance between just answering a question that’s posed and having the instincts to say “I can answer that, but I think you’re going down the wrong path.” It’s a different skill set and a much more nuanced one.
The strategic case for the manager role lives in the expertise bucket. As AI absorbs more of the repeatable work, the gap between a great manager and an average one will become more visible. The best ones are able to maximize their performance and their team’s performance through coaching, judgment, and the kind of instinct for people and deals that does not automate well.
David Donatelli at HCLSoftware said ICs typically need middle management for three things: story crafting, technical mastery beyond what the IC can do alone, and the internal bad-cop work of escalation. Gregory Milks from Intuit made a similar point: “The managers who primarily function as coordinators are probably the most exposed. The value of a strong SE leader has always been coaching, enablement, talent development, and helping teams navigate complex customer and organizational dynamics.”
What does a Solutions megamanager look like?
The reality is that most Solutions middle managers today carry both buckets, fused into one role. As AI starts pulling out the coordination layer, the role consolidates. The likely outcome: fewer managers, with deeper focus on coaching, talent development, escalation, and the customer-facing judgment that has always been the heart of the job.
This is also a meaningful shift in what you hire for. The next generation of Solutions managers will not just manage people. They will manage humans alongside AI agents on their team, which calls for a different kind of leader. Someone who can coach an SE through a hard customer conversation and set up an agent to handle the standing reporting cadence. Someone who can pass along the instincts that come from years of customer-facing work, and figure out which of those instincts can be encoded into the tooling the team relies on. That is a different job description than the one most Solutions managers have today.
Then there is the question of ratios. Five years ago, a SE manager carried five to seven direct reports. Today, in many orgs, that number is closer to ten to fifteen. AI is part of what makes the higher ratios possible, because the coordination work that used to slow managers down is being absorbed. But coaching is not coordination, and the math here gets harder.
Can a manager coach fifteen SEs the way they coached five? Probably not the same way. Removing the coordination work should open real capacity for more coaching, but how much, and what shape that coaching takes, is a question we have not seen anyone in our network answer clearly yet. Some orgs are refusing the ratio pressure to protect coaching depth. Some are building peer-coach structures or principal SE roles to distribute the load. Some are changing the shape of coaching itself, going lighter per individual deal and heavier on calibration across the team. None of these have proven out at scale yet and it also looks different based on the size and maturity of your organization.
Here is the trap most senior leaders are about to walk into. The two buckets of work live inside one role, and the org chart treats them as one job. When your CRO or CFO asks the org efficiency question, they will not be looking at two columns. They will be looking at headcount. The instinct will be to cut the manager. And when you cut the manager, you cut the coordination work AND the expertise work AND the future capacity to orchestrate humans plus agents, all in one swing.
This is the question we need to ponder. Do you want fewer managers, or do you want managers redesigned to do something more valuable than they do today?
Thinking about this for your org
John Hodgson, who spends his days recruiting Solutions leaders into the seats we are describing, pushed back a little with this: “The trend to cut management is definitely there, though I don’t believe it’s caused by AI. It’s been happening for 18 months. I suspect that it’s more a ‘doing more with less’ type initiative.”
Fair point, but it’s also a sign that this is not going away soon. Whether headcount conversations are imminent in your org or you simply want to be ahead of the conversation when it lands, the redesign question is worth thinking about now.
Audit which of your manager activities are coordination versus expertise. The coordination list is what your CFO will eventually cut without consulting you. Identify which of your managers are spending the most time on the wrong half. The answer will surprise you.
Start taking coordination off the manager role. Not merely as a delegation suggestion, but as a redesigned job description, with the AI platform you are already paying for absorbing what it can. The manager’s new responsibility is to coach humans on the work that matters and orchestrate the agents handling the tedious tasks.
Change what you measure managers on. If demo throughput and resource utilization are still the headline metrics, the redesign has not happened yet. Coaching ratio, deal coverage at the strategic level, talent retention, customer impact. Those are what tell you it is real.
What is happening to middle management is one piece of a much bigger labor shift across tech. Function by function, the org chart is getting redrawn. Solutions leadership and your teams are not exempt from these conversations. The executives who do the thinking now will weather it. The ones who do not will get a redesign they did not choose.
Are you seeing this play out in your own organization? We’d love to hear what you’re seeing. Either leave us a comment here or reach out on LinkedIn.