Flat org for AI-first teams
Kajabi VP of Engineering Jamie Wagner said they flattened their org to 30 direct reports (no intermediate managers) to run AI-first engineering — claiming productivity and decision-speed gains despite higher chaos shared. It's a bold experiment in governance for high-velocity AI workstreams.
Jamie Wagner is listed as VP of Engineering at Kajabi on his personal site "Still Building." nobodyiscertain.com Kajabi’s own 2025 "State of Creator Commerce" report says the platform supports over 30,000 creator communities and cited nearly $500 million in creator revenue, underscoring the commercial scale behind any engineering reorg there. secure.businesswire.com Consultancies and trade press have documented a wider "great flattening": Korn Ferry reported managers now routinely oversee at least 20 direct reports with some firms pushing spans as high as 50 (May 27, 2025), while Axios found people managers oversee roughly twice as many workers as five years earlier (July 8, 2025). kornferry.com Analysts warn that rapid AI initiatives carry program risk—Gartner predicted 30% of generative-AI projects would be abandoned after proof-of-concept by the end of 2025—and industry podcasts like Cables2Clouds have tracked flattening experiments and their trade-offs since early 2026. gartner.com
