Uber lays off 435 employees from engineering and product teams

Some time back, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi asked every member of his executive leadership team if they were to start from scratch, would their respective organizations look the way they do today?

The Engineering and Product leaders including Chief Product Officer Manik Gupta and CTO Thuan Pham after careful consideration, concluded that the answer to this question in many respects was no. They looked at team size, circled out duplicate roles and overlapping work, and also took in consideration individual performance to determine who would be laid off. 

As a result of this exercise, now 170 people are leaving the product team and 265 people are leaving the engineering team. 

Recently,  Uber had laid off 400 people from its marketing team as well. The American multinational transportation network company has been suffering losses and it seems like it is trying to cut costs by laying off staff.  In Q2 2019, Uber lost more than $5 Bn, its biggest quarterly revenue loss to date. Currently trading at $33.14 per share, well below its IPO pricing of $45, Uber is trying to make some changes to get itself back on track. These changes are costing 435 employees their jobs. 

“We have over 27,000 full-time employees in cities around the world, we need to shift how we design our organizations: lean, exceptionally high-performing teams, with clear mandates and the ability to execute faster than our competitors,” said Uber in a statement. 

The leadership at Uber hopes that with these changes it will be able to reset and improve how they work day to day—ruthlessly prioritizing, and always holding themselves accountable to a high bar of performance and agility. They believe that this will result in a much stronger technical organization. Uber also plans to hire some of the very best talent around the world going forward.