Rebuilding in Crisis

Kuper cut roughly half its headcount across every function at once: design, engineering, product, analytics. Product teams fell apart along with the process — each team used to have its own lineup and its own discovery. Now neither existed.

The other lead designer left the company. As a result, my scope expanded to cover the entire client product, and my team grew to seven. I now owned the whole B2C and B2B storefront CJM and made every design call.

I’d never dealt with layoffs and restructuring at this scale before. If I couldn’t hold it together, it would prove I could only lead when things were calm.

There was no playbook for this. But I knew what mattered most:

• Keep the work moving. The team was smaller, but the six-month roadmap wasn’t
• Build processes that made the work efficient, comfortable, and transparent for everyone involved
• Look after morale — the layoffs had been a shock to everyone

First, I pulled the B2C CJM designers into one shared pool. Everyone kept roughly their area but with wider scope — whoever owned cart now owned checkout too. B2B kept planning on its own; nothing broke there.

Design used to plan inside its own team. I moved it to one shared hour-long sync every two weeks — designers, PMs, researchers, and the editor, all looking at progress, workload, and new tasks together. The workload was heavy, more tasks than the team could carry, so PMs settled priority — what gets picked up first — right there, among themselves.

We also moved planning and the task inbox from Jira to a FigJam board: a PM would drop a ticket, I’d leave comments and questions, and figure out who on the team could take it. The same board also carried the team’s own backlog — design debt, accessibility, stale screens — the stuff that’s usually invisible from outside. FigJam let us see the whole load at a glance and fix things instantly.

I also asked everyone to customize their own boards however they liked. The effect was bigger than I expected. People decorated them however they wanted, brought in memes. In a hard stretch for everyone, it added some humanity — and it worked well for bringing the team together.

Alongside all this, I spent a lot of time with people one on one and in group calls, trying to keep morale up and project energy and confidence — even when I was anxious myself.

Once the shock wore off and work found its rhythm, I restructured for real. I organized the team around two halves of the funnel, which became two teams: Add2Cart (auth, retailer page, catalog, search, products) and Ordering (cart, checkout, delivery terms).

Each half got its own channel and a weekly team sync for discovery, sync-up, and sprint planning.

In each team, I named a lead designer to run these meetings, log decisions, and drive the recovery of a healthy discovery process.

The team stabilized fast, work never stopped. Planning became predictable, and the ground felt solid again — people knew how to move forward.

We didn’t just survive. The team came out stronger than it was before the cuts. That’s when we kicked off the storefront redesign, the most ambitious project of my whole time at the company.

But the result that matters most: people stayed. For almost a year and a half after the layoffs, attrition on the team was zero — given everything the team had been through.