Efficiency came for the middle
This year's layoffs didn't cut design evenly. They cut the work that couldn't show what it changed.
Meta called 2023 its year of efficiency, and in March it cut another 10,000 jobs to prove it: fewer layers, fewer managers, more people back on the tools. By May, much of the industry was running the same script.
Design didn’t get cut evenly, and the unevenness says more than the totals do.
What went first
I think the first roles to go were the ones whose output was a deliverable rather than a decision. Research that produced decks nobody acted on. Design ops built to manage the making of things, at companies that had stopped making as many things. Managers of managers. Judd Antin called it the UX research reckoning: a lot of research had been performing user-centeredness instead of changing what shipped.
That’s uncomfortable to read. When money is easy, a design org can grow by adding process, and the process looks like maturity. When money tightens, a CFO asks one question of every line on the org chart: what would be different if this weren’t here? Work that can’t answer gets cut, whatever its quality.
Point at the decision
The work that holds up has one thing in common. You can point at a shipped decision and say design caused it: this flow, this number, this thing customers stopped complaining about.
In my own work the rollback dialog on Uber’s experimentation platform is the plainest example. Its whole job is a decision: before anyone confirms, it shows how many drivers go back to control, and how many stay.
This doesn’t mean measuring design by conversion. Most of the best design work has no clean metric. It means tying design to decisions instead of deliverables. A research study that ends in “we’re not building this” saved a quarter. Say so, in those words, to the person who signs the budget.
Per designer
This year moved the job for design leaders. Headcount stopped being the measure of a design org. The new measure is how much better the product gets per designer.
That changes a leader’s week: fewer reviews of process, more reviews of the work, less time defending the team’s size and more making its effect obvious. Flatter orgs put more leaders back in the details, and the ones who never left are having an easier year.
The cuts were brutal, and plenty of good people lost good jobs for reasons that had nothing to do with their work. The question under them won’t go away when hiring comes back, though: what changed because design was in the room? A design org should have its answer ready before anyone asks.