The Management Experiment Dividing Silicon Valley

The Great Management Experiment

Gabe Larsen, who spent two years as a marketing director at Meta, got a preview of Zuckerberg’s thinking years before it made headlines. In 2022, after Zuckerberg announced 2023 as Meta’s “Year of Efficiency” during a Q4 earnings call, there was a “noticeable shift,” Larsen said.

“People started talking more about performance management and how we operate,” said Larsen, now an AI growth advisor at Signals. “That’s when it became clear his approach was different.”

It was eye-opening, Larsen said. For years, he had dutifully scheduled weekly check-ins with his reports, armed with agendas and talking points. “I’d never really thought about doing it differently,” he recalled.

But something about Zuckerberg’s reasoning clicked, and Larsen decided to run his own experiment. He eliminated scheduled one-on-ones with his direct reports in favor of what he calls “free-flowing” communication: impromptu feedback, ad-hoc strategy sessions and frequent phone calls. Over the past five years, this approach has helped him make decisions more quickly and build closer relationships with his direct reports, he said.

“The one-on-one structure hampers creativity and momentum,” Larsen asserted. “When you catch people a little off guard and they give you top-of-mind responses, it’s just so real.” 

The Case for Structure

But not everyone is ready to abandon the one-on-one. 

When engineer Jay Gengelbach first walked through Google’s doors in 2006, he was fresh out of college, eager and armed with a dim view of management. Weaned on “Dilbert” comics, he saw managers as “pointy-haired, incompetent idiots” who slowed progress with needless bureaucracy.

At the time, Google was still fine-tuning its organizational structure. Gengelbach said his managers oversaw between 40 and 75 direct reports, leaving it “up to the engineers to self-organize.” He enjoyed the freewheeling autonomy, but noticed himself gravitating toward incremental improvements over bold innovations. 

As Google developed a more structured management program, Gengelbach saw what he’d been missing. Engineering wasn’t just about writing code — it was also about understanding how that code fit into the broader picture. “Whether it’s one-on-ones or team syncs or retrospectives, you need to appreciate how what you’re doing contributes to the overall success of the company,” said Gengelbach, who worked at Google for 12 years.

After all, research still suggests that regular one-on-ones work when managers use them to give real feedback, offer support and allow employees the space to voice concerns. Last year, McKinsey concluded that companies with thoughtful performance management processes see 30% higher revenue growth than competitors. 

Now an engineering leader at Vercel, Gengelbach applies the lessons he learned at Google. He uses one-on-ones not as perfunctory status updates, but as conversations about fulfillment, obstacles and growth: “Do you feel like you're being your best self this week? What’s holding you back from doing the things you want to be doing in this company?” 

Those, he said, are “the good one-on-ones” — the kind that create space for real feedback and dialogue, not just a mechanical exchange of information. These deeper conversations don’t always happen organically during the daily rhythms of work, he believes. Some structure helps ensure they don’t fall through the cracks. 

The Hidden Costs

West’s research theoretically backs Zuckerberg’s management philosophy: with feedback baked into the every day, there’s little need for formal one-on-ones. She has one important caveat: feedback must still happen consistently. Too often, managers avoid direct feedback altogether, defaulting to generic positive comments that help no one.

Ineffective feedback processes can also cost companies, West warned. She points to NASA and Lockheed Martin’s failed mission to Mars, when a simple miscommunication about units of measurement precipitated the loss of a $125 million spacecraft. “A lack of individual-level feedback shows up as team failure, which tends to be a very expensive problem,” she said.

Even Larsen admits that holistic feedback and career development can fall by the wayside without time set aside for the broader conversations Gengelbach described. This approach may disadvantage employees from minority groups who lack the social capital or insider knowledge to navigate advancement — precisely the people that structured feedback systems were designed to protect.

For an industry that prides itself on rapid iteration and continuous improvement in product development, the irony is that many tech companies have failed to apply the same principles to employee development. West’s method treats feedback like a code review: it’s frequent, specific and focused on improvement, without judgment.

Ultimately, the format matters less than the content. Whether it’s delivered in a structured weekly meeting or over a quick coffee break, employees need feedback to guide their development. As AI becomes more embedded in work culture, the distinctly human skills that define good managers — strategic thinking, creative collaboration and complex problem-solving — will only become more critical. These capabilities don’t develop in isolation. And they may soon prove essential to managing a new kind of direct report: AI itself.