The Coordination Class Is Being Replaced
Builders and sellers remain. Measurers are being eliminated. The middle layer of organizations is being compressed.
Three Takeaways
- 1
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince framed his company's 20% cut around 'builders, sellers, and measurers' — with cuts aimed at the measurers.
- 2
Coordination-heavy roles — finance, compliance, legal, middle management, ops — are the explicit targets of May 2026 layoffs.
- 3
ClickUp, Meta, Intuit, and others made parallel cuts despite strong revenue growth. This is not cost-cutting. It is structural compression.
Cloudflare's layoffs this month came with an unusual level of clarity. CEO Matthew Prince, writing in the Wall Street Journal, described his company's workforce in three categories: builders, sellers, and measurers.
Builders make things. Sellers bring in revenue. Measurers coordinate, track, report, and manage.
The cuts were aimed at the measurers.
The Pattern Across May 2026
Cloudflare is not alone. The pattern is consistent across May 2026 layoffs:
- ClickUp: 22% reduction, targeting middle management and operations - Meta: 8,000 roles eliminated, primarily in coordination functions - Intuit: Over 3,000 employees, described as a "refocus on AI" - Groupon, Americold, Telenor: Similar structural compressions
What these announcements share is a target: coordination-heavy roles. Finance. Compliance. Legal. Operations. Middle management. The roles that existed to measure, track, report, and coordinate work that AI can now do faster.
Why Coordination Roles Are Vulnerable
Coordination roles exist because work needed to be tracked, managed, and reported across human workers who could not see each other's output in real time.
AI changes this. When AI agents execute workflows, the coordination is built into the system. The tracking is automatic. The reporting is continuous. The management overhead that existed to bridge human workers becomes redundant.
The roles that remain valuable are:
1. Builders: People who create — engineers, designers, product developers. AI augments their work but cannot replace the creative judgment.
2. Sellers: People who bring in revenue — salespeople, account managers, business developers. AI can assist but cannot replace the relationship and trust-building.
3. Specialists: People with deep domain expertise who can direct AI, intervene when it fails, and make judgment calls that require human accountability.
What is being eliminated are the roles that coordinated between these functions.
The Uncomfortable Question
If you are in a coordination role, the question is not whether your role will be affected. It is when, and whether you will have transitioned before it happens.
This is not a judgment on the value of coordination work. For decades, it was essential. Organizations could not function without the human layer that tracked, managed, and reported.
But that layer is being compressed. The organizations making cuts are not struggling companies desperate to reduce costs. Cloudflare had 30%+ revenue growth. Intuit is profitable. These cuts are not about survival. They are about structure.
What Organizations Should Be Doing
For the coordination class, the path forward is specialization or transition:
- Specialization: Move from general coordination to specialized oversight. AI governance. Compliance for autonomous systems. Human-in-the-loop review. The coordination work that remains will be about overseeing AI, not coordinating humans.
- Transition: Move toward builder or seller functions. The people who create and the people who sell are not being eliminated. If coordination is your current function, the question is what function you move toward.
For organizations, the imperative is humane transition:
- Transparent communication: If coordination roles are being eliminated, say so. Do not pretend this is temporary cost-cutting when it is structural change.
- Reskilling investment: Provide pathways for coordination workers to transition to specialist, builder, or seller functions.
- Timeline clarity: Workers deserve to know the timeline. "We will eliminate these roles over 18 months" is more humane than "surprise, you are gone next week."
The Shape of What Remains
The organization that emerges from this compression is leaner but not smaller in capability. Builders and sellers remain. AI agents handle the coordination. Specialists oversee the AI.
The pyramid becomes a different shape. The middle is compressed. The top (specialists who oversee) and the bottom (AI agents that execute) expand. The traditional middle management layer shrinks.
This is not hypothetical. It is happening now, across industries, with explicit framing from the CEOs making the decisions.
*Sources: Ragan, "The week in comms" (May 28, 2026); Implicator.ai, "The AI Layoff Memo Has a New Target: Middle Management Is First" (May 23, 2026); TechCrunch, "Intuit to lay off over 3,000 employees to refocus on AI" (May 20, 2026)*
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About GeneralArc
GeneralArc is operating model architecture for the AI transition. Its methodology was built across more than two decades inside the operating models of JPMorgan Chase, McKinsey & Company, Nomura, and Deutsche Bank — leading change across 100,000+ employees.
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