Tech companies are like glaciers, 20 people at the tip of this project will be leveraging all of FB’s internal tooling and might be able to get more done.

Also, it would be difficult and maybe a waste of effort to try to scale a team faster than that, with midterms so close. For sure they can increase headcount if it’s successful.

My point was that this isn't as significant as they make it out to be--comparing it to the transition to mobile is marketing BS.

You're joking right? FB has over 25 thousand employees and you think 20 people is a significant reorientation effort? Or that a team any larger would have problems a scaling?

Then put 100 people in the room? 1000? Not sure what's the point of having everyone in the single room, when the entire company is in the single company anyway.

The article lists several on the team. They’re mostly senior executives, data scientists and engineers. They’re definitely pulling strings from that room - in total, there’s a team of 300 specifically working on the issue, not to mention the dozens of teams that make this type of real time analysis and decision making possible.

Depends. Can those 20 people then pull in other teams on a high priority basis and have them do work for them? I agree generally that 20 people can't do much, but if it is 20 people with the institutional support of thousands then it is a different story.