Things have been tentative at Meta since it reported its results for the first quarter. Despite showing off massive gains for advertisers in the quarter, growth was rather slow.

Now the company has sent out a memo that The Verge managed to get its hands on and, things are looking grim.

The memo was penned by chief product officer Chris Cox and it outlines the challenges the company faces in the second half of the year and what its priorities should be.

The key priority for Meta is of course, the Metaverse and its Horizon World platform, however, Cox said that employees shouldn’t except extra hands in creating this new and as yet not fully understood technology.

“I have to underscore that we are in serious times here and the headwinds are fierce. We need to execute flawlessly in an environment of slower growth, where teams should not expect vast influxes of new engineers and budgets,” wrote Cox.

“We must prioritize more ruthlessly, be thoughtful about measuring and understanding what drives impact, invest in developer efficiency and velocity inside the company, and operate leaner, meaner, better exciting teams,” the CPO added.

That sounds about right for the 2020s, a C-Suite asking employees to do more and reach new heights without giving them additional resources. There are reports claiming Meta is cutting its new engineer hiring target by 30 percent which citing Reuters but we can’t verify the authenticity of this claim.

The firm is also pushing hard to monetise Reels more effectively. The CPO says that time spent on Reels has increased 80 percent since March.

Other areas the firm is prioritising are Community Messaging, AI, Privacy and Monetisation.