Lenny RachitskyHost of Lenny's Podcast | Author of Lenny's Newsletter

The shape of product teams in 2026

10 Jul 2026 · 1 min

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In this talk, Lenny Rachitsky explains how large product organizations are redesigning their team structures for 2026. Historically, a "canonical" product team consisted of separate specialist groups—multiple Android, iOS, and server engineers, a generalist, a product manager, a designer, and occasionally a data scientist. The new model replaces these silos with small, cross‑functional "pods" of four to six engineers who are more generalist, and introduces a "product staff" role that blends product management with design, data science, and research capabilities. By shrinking the number of distinct functions that must coordinate, these pods can move faster and make higher‑quality decisions.

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What does just the Canonical product team look like in 2026? All of the functions are starting to bleed into each other and the whole industry is wrestling with what that means. For the longest time at a big company like ours, the Canonical team was something like 2 or 3 Android engineers, 2 or 3 iOS engineers, 2 or 3 server engineers, maybe a generalist, a PM, a designer, a data scientist, if you were lucky, maybe that's about it. But this year it's changing. We've adopted what we call pods, which are mini teams, call it 4 to 6 engineers who are a bit more generalist. One we call product staff, 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, and then whatever specialist they need. Just by virtue of having less people to coordinate, they can often move faster and make better decisions.