Run a layoff
The hardest decision a leadership team makes.
A workforce reduction is the decision leadership teams most regret rushing and most regret softening. Run synchronously, it collapses into the CEO's framing and a room afraid to dissent. Async contribution forces each leader to own a number and a named risk before the group converges — and produces the on-record reasoning you will need when the decision is questioned later.
Should we proceed with a workforce reduction this quarter?
Frame: target % reduction, expected runway gain, and the alternatives explicitly considered (revenue acceleration, cost cuts elsewhere, fundraise window). Every contributor must name at least one risk they would own if we proceed and one if we don't.
What each contributor weighs
Ask everyone to put these on the table privately, before they see another contributor's position.
- The target reduction as a percentage and headcount, and the runway months it actually buys.
- The alternatives you genuinely weighed: revenue acceleration, non-people cost cuts, a fundraise window.
- One risk you would personally own if the team proceeds — and one if it does not.
- Which functions can absorb the cut without breaking a committed roadmap.
- Runway pressure
- Strategy change leaving teams without scope
- Performance + market dual squeeze
How this decision usually goes wrong
- Salami-slicing — a too-small cut that forces a second, more damaging round in two quarters.
- Protecting the org chart instead of the strategy: cutting where it's easy, not where it's right.
- No dissent on record, so the team relitigates the decision the day severance lands.
- Treating it purely as a finance exercise and ignoring who carries the surviving work.
How to run this decision in 48 hours
- Open a room seeded with the question above. Set a 48-hour deadline.
- Paste the opening context — keep it short. Engineers will not read more than 300 words.
- Invite by email. Each contributor submits position + reasoning + risks privately, before seeing anyone else.
- Read the synthesis. Claude maps consensus, dissent, blind spots, and confidence.
- Decide and log. The synthesis is the decision-log entry — no separate write-up.
A synthesis that states the defensible size once, with the runway math, the alternatives explicitly rejected, and the owned risks on both sides — the artifact you can stand behind in the all-hands.
Related reading
- Why every distributed engineering team needs a decision log
- Async vs sync engineering decisions: how to choose