Three reductions had already happened before I arrived at this one. Engineering and product development had not been touched in any of them.
That is not sentiment. It is a pattern, and a pattern tells you what a company believes is load-bearing.
This one was not about performance. It was about cost.
I had just finished reading the product and the organization, which is the work I am usually brought in to do and the reason I could see what was coming.
Cutting where the money was would leave the company depending on a small number of individuals to a degree I would call crippling. Not a skills gap. A concentration of knowledge in people who could resign.
I said so. Then I signed it.
No quantities here, and none anywhere on this page. The headcount is not mine to publish. The shape of the decision is.
Read the chain downward and there is no branch where the risk goes away. There is only a branch where the company runs out of options before it gets to use the risk it took.
The capital is what made everything after it possible, including narrowing the number of products we were trying to be good at.
A cost you can see in advance is still a cost.
Every other story on this site is a thing that was filed under the wrong heading, and putting the right name on it opened something up.
Nothing was misnamed here. Everybody in the room could see the trade. There was no clever reading available, no second interpretation, nothing to reclassify.
Which is why it is the one I think about.
Sometimes the heading is correct and you still have to choose which thing to break.
I knew I would spend the following year managing a dependency I had made worse, and I did.
That is the part worth saying out loud, because the alternative version of this page stops at the raise and lets you assume it worked out.
If you hire me and the read comes back saying your best option carries a cost you cannot remove, I will tell you what the cost is and I will not dress it as an opportunity. Then it is your decision, which is the only place it can sit.