Re: Layoffs
Tech layoffs are picking up. I’ve experienced layoffs at three different companies: Life360, Breeze and Abstract. In this post I’ll share my layoff story from each one.
With the recent downturn in the tech market, layoffs are starting to pick up. Just this week, Coinbase laid off >1k employees.
I’ve been in tech long enough to earn some “battle scars”; I’ve had a front row seat to rounds of layoffs in three companies. I’ve been both the employee being laid off, and also the employee who “survived” a layoff.
Some of the people reading this might be experiencing a layoff currently* or in the near future (hopefully not) and I wanted to offer some thoughts about the topic with the goal of normalizing the layoff experience and reminding people that it’s not the end of the world.
*If you’ve been affected by a layoff and are starting your job search, check out this comprehensive guide for bootstrapping a job search that I published back in 2020 right after accepting an offer from Facebook. It’s written for a PM job search but a lot of the content is applicable to other roles.
I’ve experienced layoffs at three different companies: Life360, Breeze and Abstract. Following are my layoff stories from each company.
Life360
I joined Life360 in 2014 (read How I landed my first startup job through a roadtrip for the story about how I got that job) when it was a Series B company with ~30 employees. The company had the market-leading location sharing app for families and it was growing meaningfully. Working there exposed me to all kinds of tech roles and shaped my career significantly; it’s where I first discovered product management.
About a year into my time at Life360, I had decided I wanted to be a product manager. I started supporting a couple product managers and things were going well. I was learning a lot and felt appreciated by the teams I was helping. I was pushing for a promotion to a formal PM role, but that wasn’t working.
We had raised $50mm from ADT shortly after I joined and the company grew to ~75 people in less than a year. But our key metrics were essentially flat.
About 1.5 years in, I got a message one afternoon from our CTO (who was also serving a COO role at the time) asking if I could come in a little early the next morning for a 1:1. We’d never had this kind of meeting before, so it was immediately strange and I knew something was up.
We met at 8am on a Friday. It was me, him, and our head of HR.
Oh crap.
“I’m really sorry but today is going to be your last day at the company. We thank you for everything and wish you the best. [HR person] will give you the details.”
And then he just got up and walked out of the room.
After he was gone, the HR person told me that was the worst delivery she’s ever seen in these kinds of meetings and apologized to me for the way it was done. She walked me through the details of my severance and told me how much she enjoyed working with me and that she has no doubt I’ll land somewhere great. It meant a lot.
When the dust settled, I found that ~20 people were let go that morning or ~25% of the company. I was never fired before and felt a mixture of elation, relief and shame. But I knew I would be okay. It was the kick in the butt that I needed for the next chapter.
Epilogue: three years later, Life360 went public in Australia and trades under ASX:360 to this day.
Breeze
As it happens, at the time of the Life360 layoff I was already in advanced stages of interviewing with a Series A startup called Breeze.
Breeze was leasing Toyota Priuses to Uber and Lyft drivers who didn’t have their own car to use for ride sharing income. Breeze had ~50 employees and was hiring their first product manager.
I got lucky and ended up joining the team a week or so after my severance package ended. My goal was clear: lead a team to build a fleet management tool from scratch so that we could scale our fleet from 1k cars across 6 cities to 10k cars across dozens of cities (read: Should startup PMs focus on internal tools?)
The team was incredible and after six months, we launched our internal fleet management tool, Carmada. By that time, we had ~90 employees.
Not even a month after we went live with the tool, we had an all hands meeting. We were taking massive losses on our fleet. Our cars were coming back with a lot of damage and our customers were refusing to cover the repair costs. And this was happening as a main case.
Our CEO told us that we would be having team meetings to cover the implications for each of the teams. The eng/product/design team got in a room and were told that we were all sticking around. But that other teams would be impacted more heavily.
Within hours, it became clear about half the company got laid off. We were down to ~50 employees. Morale was low with the remaining team but I survived that layoff.
Our CEO told us that we had 100 days to find a partner or buyer, otherwise the company would probably run out of cash. There was no clear plan for what we needed to build on the product/design/eng side, so we were mostly waiting for our business and finance team to make something happen. To save the day.
My teammates from that period will remember us playing a lot of ping pong, doing puzzles, playing chess, and happy hours. We were literally just waiting.
About a month after the first round of layoffs, there was another round of layoffs. This time, it happened in a less dramatic fashion. Another 15-20 people were let go. I survived that round too.
We were down to 25 people by the time Ford decided to acquire the Breeze team and tech. We spun up a new business called Canvas under the Ford umbrella (with Carmada powering the entire fleet).
The vast majority of that final team of 25 people stuck together in the years following the acquisition. I stayed two years post-acquisition and watched Canvas grow to 100 employees before I made my next move.
Epilogue: Ford ended up selling Canvas to Fair.com after I left
Abstract
After Ford acquired Breeze, we set an ambitious goal of launching a brand new alternative to car ownership business within six months (targeting high credit consumers, moving away from ride sharing entirely). That business became Canvas.
We needed to build a lot of product in a very short timeframe and were being as scrappy as possible to keep things moving. We were interviewing designers but weren’t confident that we’d onboard them in time to hit our launch goal.
I became a hybrid PM+designer, shaping the entire UI/UX for our checkout flow.
Around that time, our only designer Max excitedly announced one day that he was able to secure an invitation to the alpha of an exciting new design collaboration tool called Abstract. Abstract would bring the git workflow that engineers have been using for decades to the design world. The whole coordination dance around downloading and naming and uploading Sketch files would be solved with Abstract’s branch+commit+merge flow.
We fell in love with Abstract. But it had a lot of room for improvement. So I started sending their team feedback. Lots of it. I ended up even organizing lunches between the Abstract team and the Canvas team. We got close and helped them improve their product.
One morning, I had breakfast with one of the co-founders. He was telling me how projects were not shipping on time and they’re generally struggling to keep execution strong as they scale the team. I asked him when they’re going to hire PMs. He gave me some hand-wavy answer.
That morning, I sent him an email and told him I think they should hire me as their first PM. I would bring a lot of rigor and discipline to execution, and I’m already an expert on the product (both as a designer and a PM working with designers).
I joined Abstract when there were ~60 employees and a few months after I joined, the company announced a $30mm Series C. We were off to the races and by the end of that first year, we had doubled the team size.
We were growing but starting to see concerning signs of churn. Abstract was only compatible with Sketch and Adobe XD, but Figma was quickly eating the design tool market. Figma went from a non-factor in 2018 to the market winner in 2020. I spent all of 2019 at Abstract watching the transformation happen and it was unbelievable.
By the end of 2019, we were seeing large customers like Shopify take their hundreds of paying seats and move over to Figma. Then it happened with Microsoft. And it kept happening, fast.
In early 2020, right before COVID, Abstract had a big round of layoffs. ~30 people were let go in a single morning, or about 30% of the company. As the Slack accounts of the laid off employees started showing as “Deactivated”, employees were wondering if they were next. Two hours into the morning, I was still safe.
But then I got a ping from our CEO, Josh, asking to get on a call. HR was there. Josh delivered the news in a very human way and expressed a ton of appreciation. He was on the verge of tears. I felt for him and told him it’s okay.
I didn’t survive the layoff that time and was sad to go, but also felt a big sense of relief. The existential threat from Figma wasn’t my problem anymore.
I began interviewing aggressively right as the pandemic was starting, which was rough. Everyone was adjusting to working from home and I had a ton of awkward interviews. Ultimately, I landed a PM offer at Facebook and took it.
Epilogue: almost a year after the layoff, Abstract was sold for parts to Adobe.
I’ll wrap this up with a few takeaways from my experiences with layoffs:
Being laid off can accelerate career growth. I was struggling to get a PM role at Life360 and when they laid me off, I had no choice but to go for it with a new company and landed my first PM role at Breeze. When Abstract was struggling, I was frustrated we weren’t taking Figma seriously. Being laid off from Abstract forced me to find my next role, landing at Facebook. That was a big career step.
Layoffs aren’t personal. Companies are just people. People can get scared and worried about the future, sometimes requiring hard decisions to extend their runway. While being let go can feel personal at the time, I’ve come to realize that it was never personal and it wasn’t a reflection of my value as a human or employee. It’s just business.
It can be better to be laid off than to survive the layoff. Morale tanks after layoffs, and it’s not always a huge win to “survive”. Being laid off freed me up to find new opportunities, liberated from the weight of the company’s struggles (struggles often go hand-in-hand with layoffs). I don’t necessarily envy people who survive layoffs.
Get your story straight. If you’ve been laid off and are about to start interviewing, you might be asked about the build-up to the layoff and any lessons you learned from the company’s mistakes that led to the layoff. I suggest having a good story ready to share about why the layoff happened and what you think the business could have done differently to avoid it.
Life goes on. In the moment, being laid off can feel like your career is ending. It’s not. I’ve seen first-hand how quickly people rebound from layoffs. People are resilient. You’ll find a new job and you’ll be fine. It’s really not a big problem. Believe in yourself, put yourself out there, and build a pipeline of new opportunities. You’ll land somewhere good.
Note: for a comprehensive, practical guide about bootstrapping a job search, I recommend checking out this resource I published before I joined Facebook in 2020. It’s written for a PM job search but a lot of the content is applicable to other roles.
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