Meta forms new Wearables group and lays off some employees

This morning, Meta CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth announced the biggest restructuring of the company’s hardware division since it was renamed to Reality Labs in 2020.

All teams in Reality Labs are being merged into two groups: a central “Metaverse” organization that now includes the Quest headset line and a new “Wearables” organization that encompasses the rest of Meta’s hardware efforts, including its smart glasses with Ray-Ban. (You can read the full internal memo announcing the changes below.)

The restructuring means that some employees in Reality Labs were also laid off, as I’ve confirmed with multiple sources. I don’t know the exact number of cuts (Meta declined to comment) but have heard that it’s a relatively small number and focused on teams in Reality Labs where leadership roles are now redundant thanks to this new structure.

In the internal memo to employees that I obtained, Bosworth calls Meta’s latest smart glasses with Ray-Ban “a much bigger hit than we anticipated” and alludes to the roadmap of AR glasses the company has in store. As I’ve reported before, Meta is planning a version of the Ray-Bans with a heads-up display and accompanying wristband with a neural interface for controlling the glasses. Meanwhile, it’s far along in the development of its extremely expensive set of AR glasses with full, holographic displays, codenamed Orion.

“We have the leading AI device on the market right now, and we are doubling down on finding strong product market fit for wearable Meta AI, building a business around it, and expanding the audience,” Bosworth writes in his memo. “Our north star to overlay digital content seamlessly onto the physical world remains the same but the steps on that path just got a lot more exciting.”

Despite it being a wearable in its own right, the Quest headset line is moving to the Metaverse group that also includes Horizon, Meta’s Roblox-like social network that has struggled to gain traction so far. My understanding of the logic here is that Quest uses an entirely different tech stack than the AR hardware, and that Meta’s AI assistant (which is already included in the Ray-Bans) is more applicable now for the glasses form factor than headsets.

Bosworth is clear that Horizon isn’t being given up on in his memo, saying “we are deeply committed to investing in Horizon as the core foundation of our social, spatial Horizon OS.” (Meta recently started licensing its OS to outside OEMs for them to build bespoke hardware.) “This new structure will enable us to create a more integrated product experience across hardware, software, and experiences with less friction and fragmentation.”

After talking to sources at various levels of Meta today, this restructuring of Reality Labs sounds like it should have happened a while ago. Change is always hard, and while there’s a lot of uneasiness about the job cuts and a fear more are coming, no one on the inside will deny that Reality Labs had become too sprawling and unwieldy.

The two big winners in this new structure are Alex Himel, a longtime Meta VP who runs Wearables, and Vishal Shah, who was already leading Horizon and is now adding the Quest line to his org. They both report to Bosworth and now effectively run all of Reality Labs under him.

Ultimately, Meta knows it still has a lot to prove in hardware, especially in the category of AR where it has poured billions into glasses technology that still hasn’t seen the light of day. I expect we’ll see more on the glasses front later this year, though the next Ray-Bans with a display won’t be coming until next year.

“The org chart doesn’t primarily determine whether we succeed or fail, our execution does,” Bosworth says in his memo. “But by setting it up this way I hope we reduce overhead and allow people across teams to come together and execute with a more unified view of who our customers are and how we can best serve them.”

You can read his internal memo to Meta employees below:

An Update to RL’s Structure

With Quest 3 bringing MR into the mainstream, we have finally gotten to a place where we feel like all the major components are in place for us to grow our software platform consistently. The best reflection of that is that now we have a long-term vision of how the software experience is going to evolve over the next two years.

Meanwhile Ray-Ban Meta glasses are a much bigger hit than we anticipated which bodes well for our near-term AR roadmap. Combine that with the exciting functionality of Meta AI, we see a lot more value from the products we are building even before the full AR vision is ready.

As Mark and I discussed at IRL, we’re seeing the different paths we’ve taken start to narrow and come into sharper focus. Here are the changes we’re making to recognize and capitalize on that shift.

Metaverse

We’re bringing the team working on MR into the Metaverse product group led by Vishal Shah and realigning the components to be more horizontally aligned instead of vertical. We are deeply committed to investing in Horizon as the core foundation of our social, spatial Horizon OS, and high-quality experiences for both mixed reality and mobile. This new structure will enable us to create a more integrated product experience across hardware, software, and experiences with less friction and fragmentation.

This will also help us deliver a unified platform with the right components and toolchain so we can become the preferred choice for creators and developers building on the next generation of computing devices. I cannot stress enough how important it is for us to get these platform pieces right and it has been a challenge to make progress in our current structure. I’m excited to see all of this take shape.

Wearables

We’re renaming the AR product group led by Alex Himel to Wearables. We have the leading AI device on the market right now, and we are doubling down on finding strong product market fit for wearable Meta AI, building a business around it, and expanding the audience. Our north star to overlay digital content seamlessly onto the physical world remains the same but the steps on that path just got a lot more exciting.

The immense opportunities AI’s acceleration has brought to the team has already led to a horizontal restructuring late last year so that they can move faster against these tailwinds and continue to integrate product areas into one coherent roadmap across wearable form factors, platform, and AI.

XR Tech, Devices, and RLBG

As part of this change we are also moving parts of XR Tech that are closely tied to product or platform into Wearables and Metaverse as appropriate.

In turn, we will be rethinking the interface between Devices and XR Tech. XR Tech will remain our primary team focused on developing technology too early or risky for product teams to adopt, especially if it benefits both Metaverse and Wearables. We will share more details of this when we have them in a couple of weeks.

RLBG, under Dan Reed, will be federating content design into the product groups. Other groups like PMM, UXR, Analytics, and Sales will remain centralized as they are today. However we are creating two new roles we are calling “business group leads”, one for Metaverse and one for Wearables, to partner with their respective product group leads and help them coordinate across the breadth of RLBG.

The Road Ahead

The org chart doesn’t primarily determine whether we succeed or fail, our execution does, but by setting it up this way I hope we reduce overhead and allow people across teams to come together and execute with a more unified view of who our customers are and how we can best serve them.

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