Organisational leadership
Leading a design team through reorg and layoff
Three reorgs in five months, ending in a company-wide layoff. My team came out stable, one report’s promotion survived intact, and our shrunken capacity bought us a seat at the org’s central design table.
- Role
- Design Manager
- Company
- Atlassian
- Timeframe
- Nov 2025 – Mar 2026
- Team
- ~6 designers
01Three structural hits in a row
I lead platform navigation design at Atlassian — the layer that decides how millions of people move across Jira, Confluence, and the rest of the suite. Between late 2025 and early 2026, the design org took three structural hits in five months.
Any one of them is enough to quietly destabilise a team. People check out, context leaks away, and the work either stalls or gets cut.
A peer leader made redundant
Her remit folded into mine — org-scope strategy work included, with no transition plan attached.
A badly-communicated reorg
I became the receiving leader for displaced work while the official story was still being written.
A company-wide layoff
Live workstreams paused, people cut from my team, and my reporting line moved to a new executive overnight.
02The fork every leader faces here
The obvious move
Absorb the shock quietly. Wait for HR comms to catch up. Say as little as possible. That instinct feels protective — it isn’t. You lose context and momentum, and the team’s standing slips while you’re busy being careful.
The actual job
Keep the team together, and keep its work credible, through overlapping disruption: no clear reporting lines, shrinking headcount, people sitting in grief. That takes moving earlier than the org, not slower.
03Five moves, in the order they landed
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Lead from anticipation
On the morning of the layoff, before the company-wide comms even dropped, I went straight to my new senior leader — established the reporting relationship, gave him a read on the engineering impact to my area, and set a business-as-usual line. My own people were already quietly briefed, so nobody got surprised from either direction.
Nobody on the team learned the news from a company email.
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Name the roster out loud
I posted a team-wide check-in that said plainly where each person stood. Within a few hours I turned the thread from “how are you feeling” toward “let’s reconnect and spar on the actual work.” The grief was real; it just needed somewhere to go.
Clarity first, then somewhere for the energy to land.
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Treat succession as one continuous arc
When a peer leader was made redundant, I’d already checked in with her before the news went public. Inside a day of disclosure I clarified reporting lines, confirmed an affected report’s promotion path was safe, and sat in the conversation where the departing leader handed me her org-scope strategy work herself — with the redistributed workload agreed with my manager first, not quietly absorbed.
Agreed the workload up front over absorbing it silently.
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Reframe constraint as an offer
At the new central design-leadership forum I named my team’s real constraints instead of hiding them, then framed our remaining capacity as something the org could use to unblock itself. Honest beat polished.
The honest capacity read is what won the seat.
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Make the team durable without me
Before a two-week absence that landed right after a major launch, I wrote one planning page mapping a dozen-plus workstreams — each with a named owner and a source-of-truth link — then ran a proper deputisation conversation so the map had a human behind it. The team could orient itself without pinging me on holiday.
One page, one deputy, two weeks of leaderless running.
04What came out the other side
Stable through the worst stretch of the year
The team stayed oriented through every transition, and its remaining work came out elevated rather than diminished — a team people assumed was winding down became a named voice in the leadership tier.
A strategic seat we earned
Naming our reduced capacity honestly won a cross-org handover and a standing seat in weekly central planning.
A promotion that survived
One report’s promotion case held through a reorg that normally derails exactly that kind of case.
Two weeks running leaderless
Off one planning page and a named deputy — a dozen-plus workstreams, each with an owner and a source of truth.
Scaffolding others reused
A 48-hour research sprint produced team-snapshot briefings and a new-org onboarding guide that other teams picked up.
The departing leader chose me to inherit her highest-profile strategy work. That choice said more about how the scope was seen than any title change could.
05What I’d sharpen next time
The stabilisation work held up. What I’d sharpen is closing the loop on the wins. More than once I shipped the package — the briefing, the honest capacity read, the positioning — then never confirmed it had actually landed with the right senior leader. A real win can sit unbooked for days that way.
Anticipation gets the work done; I want the same discipline about checking it was received.
I’d also want a cleaner before-and-after read on team health through transitions like these. The stability was real and visible, but right now it’s my read, not a tracked number.