The Layoff List I Got Wrong

Fourteen names on the list. The framework had been straightforward: rank the team by some combination of recent performance and tenure, draw the line. The list got approved by the board, communicated to the team, and executed in a single day in March. By September, three of the cuts looked retrospectively wrong.

The three were people the company needed in the second half of the year, against work the leadership team had not anticipated when the list was drawn. A senior CSM who would have been the right person to manage the customer-retention initiative that became Q3's priority. A mid-level engineer who, by September, would have been the obvious lead for a new infrastructure project the team eventually contracted out at three times the cost. A designer whose specialty became central to the product direction the company pivoted toward in late summer.

Each of the three had been cut because the framework was backward-looking. Recent performance, weighted by tenure. The framework rewarded people who had been around the longest and produced consistent past output. The framework did not ask what the company would need in the future. The framework caught past performers and lost future fits.

The right framework is forward-looking. It starts with a role-by-role projection of what the company will need in the next eighteen months. The projection maps to specific people. The cuts are the people the future roles don't require, regardless of past performance. This framework is uncomfortable because it requires the leadership team to defend specific judgments about which future skills matter.

The discomfort is the cost of getting the list right. Most companies do the easier version because the easier version is defensible against why was this person cut. The answer — they were ranked at the bottom of recent performance — is clean. The forward-looking answer — their skills do not match where we need to go — is harder to defend and produces better outcomes.

The retrospective on most layoffs is rarely done. When it is — six months out, against the actual work the company ended up doing — three to five cuts per fifty usually look structurally wrong. The wrongness is visible only against the future the company eventually walked into.

The deeper habit is to do the forward-looking work before the cuts get made, not after.