The org didn't need my role anymore. I was the one who said so.

Situation

About a year into my role as General Manager of Xbox Data, my organization, around 40 people, merged with the marketing data organization under one VP. The VP placed the marketing director above me, over two teams with different cultures that now had to move in one direction. We disagreed on what that direction should be, and the disagreement took work to resolve. I wanted to use data science to improve the player experience directly, outward-facing work aimed at product experience and customer experience. He wanted the team focused inward, on the insights and analytics that explained the product to the business. The call went his way. Once that was settled, we worked through what it actually meant together, back-and-forth until we had a shared understanding of where the org needed to go.

At the same time, Fortnite, which was driving revenue into Xbox, went into a usage decline. The forecast had Xbox missing its revenue targets because of it. Leadership moved into proactive reductions of operating spend across the org, headcount included.

Task

My manager handed me the job of building the headcount-reduction scenarios for Xbox Data. That meant committing fully to a direction I’d argued against, and recommending whichever plan actually served it best. The target was a 10% cut, four roles, out of a merged org that had grown to roughly fifty people.

Action

Natural attrition was already off the table. I’d already dealt with the org’s underperformers before this, so there was nothing left to harvest that way. That left two live choices. Spread the cuts evenly across every team, the safe-feeling option that avoids picking a fight. Or look at the org’s actual shape against the new direction and remove whatever function it didn’t need.

I ran the second option honestly. Under an inward-facing analytics direction, the org didn’t need the program-management layer I’d built, or most of the technical program managers inside it. One junior PM could run the day-to-day rhythm of business just fine. The four roles that direction didn’t need were three of my TPMs and my own.

I could have built the opposite case. Recast what my team could still deliver, argue the org still needed the depth it had, protect my people and my own role along with them. That case would have been easy to make and hard to challenge from the outside. It just didn’t hold up against the direction that had actually been decided, so I didn’t make it.

I recommended eliminating the function instead. My manager and the VP worked through the reasoning with me before it went final. Nobody else in the org knew I was the one who’d built the plan. That’s what leadership implemented.

Result

• The cuts, roughly $2M in headcount, came entirely out of the one function the new direction didn’t need.
• My own role went through the same notification process as the other three. That meant a meeting request the night before, then the standard call, over Zoom since it was 2020. Once it landed, I checked in with the people on my team who were also affected, to see how they were doing.
• The org got the shape it actually needed for the direction it had chosen.
• The reduction read as a clean, direction-driven decision. Nobody was left wondering if they were next, or whether it was really about performance.
• The spread-it-everywhere option would have weakened every team equally without fixing the misalignment. Recommending function removal instead avoided that trap.
• No further restructuring hit that team for close to two years. The next RIF, when it came, landed in an industry that’s had rolling reductions ever since. That’s industry churn. The structural choice held up.
• My backup plan, an internal move within Gaming, fell through when COVID froze hiring org-wide. My first instinct was reflexive: go interview at the other big tech companies, land a strong offer, collect the sign-on and the stock, put in five years, and get out. Partway through that search, I recognized it for what it was, the wrong reason to take a job. I started looking at small businesses instead, the decision that put me on the path the rest of this site picks up.

Learning

Both moments ran on the same discipline. What the situation actually needed and what I wanted to protect were two different things, and I had to choose the situation. The first time, that meant turning down the easy case that my team and my role were still worth keeping. That case stopped holding up once the direction had actually been decided. The second time, it meant admitting that another big-tech job, sign-on and five safe years included, was familiar territory rather than something I actually wanted.

What made each story convincing was how badly I wanted it to be true. Looking at it honestly was the only way to find out it wasn’t.

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