Still at Automattic

Last week, my employer, Automattic, announced a restructuring. “Restructuring” at Automattic isn’t terribly unusual. Team structures change regularly. This one, though, included a layoff or “reduction in force” in today’s jargon, which is the first for Automattic.

We’ve had pushes for improving performance management, which has led to an increase in departures, including sometimes a whole team being let go due to the team’s overall performance. This is the first time there have been straight layoffs.

If you’re looking for talented, passionate individuals to join your team, there are many excellent people #OpenToWork on LinkedIn now.

This is my first time going through a round of this at a company. I’ve worked at places where individual positions were cut due to budget, but this was a new experience. There are many people I will miss not seeing on Slack or the next time we cross paths at a meetup.

I have nothing else to say about the RIF attached to the restructuring.

Internally, we are flattening out a bit to break down some silos that have developed over the years, as well as unify the engineering part of the organization. Previously, there were pretty firm divisions between WordPress.com, Jetpack, and WooCommerce engineering teams, yet a lot of work would cross over to other domains. To help us not try to fix the same problems in multiple ways, often exposing our customers to a disjointed experience, we’re all linked up together now.

Part of that is also reducing levels of leadership. Previously, we had our business units (e.g., WordPress.com, Jetpack), which would have a business lead (“CEO of Jetpack” or “General Manager of Jetpack” or however they wished to be styled), an engineering chief (“CTO of Jetpack”), a team of Directors (“Director of Product Engineering”, e.g., me), and several teams with their own team leads under their umbrella. In Automattic fashion, these titles weren’t consistent, so “lead of leads” was the common way to describe the director level in Jetpack.

With the restructuring, the software product engineers are in a bucket with a lead (company-wide CTO-type role). Within that are a few higher-level groupings (the evolution of the division CTO role, but divisions aren’t determined by product), with engineering teams directly under that role. In other words, the “Director” or “Lead of Leads” level has been removed.

What does that mean for me? I’m working with an existing team that has led our site performance product. In addition to the product itself, I’ll look for various ways to improve the performance of some of our other products. I’ll also continue my work with Secure Custom Fields.