During the economic slowdown many tech sector employees face layoffs.   
It happens a lot in audio and music industry too. How to avoid those layoffs and what Products Leaders can do to help? 

In this article I propose a few things you can do as a Head of Product to improve the financial situation of the company and thus prevent it from sacking people. 

During a rapid growth companies often buy tools, servers and other infrastructure required to fulfill needs of raising number of clients. And with constant pressure from the market, it is never a right moment to stop and revise it. But when you finally revise your assets, you may realize you have dozens of Azure machines, unused cloud subscriptions, you pay for many inactive Jira user accounts, you have many other tools that are not needed. Start by cutting this cost – you may be surprised you save hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Pic 1 – (A lot of) Audio Hardware

Look for inefficiencies and fix them. It does not always mean working with time consuming and complex issues: it may be standardizing labels in Jira or better structured documentation in Confluence, organizing meetings with clear agenda and making sure we invite only people that are needed.

You can also automate things: from ticket flow inside Jira, thought using services like Zapier to automate data flow between systems to using AI – it can be initially just for research, marketing or notes taking to building advanced AI Agents using services like n8n.

Pic 2 – My Zapier account where I build automations

Do you have multiple products? Analyze the performance of your portfolio. Are there any products than are not making expected profit? Or maybe you have some legacy products that you were always reluctant to kill despite the fact they don’t fit your current plan or are too expensive to maintain? This may be a good moment to re-focus the energy company’s onto the cash cows – highly profitability, stable products that provide financial stability and to any strategic projects that can ensure the future advantage. 

We discuss this subject in details in our previous articles How to optimise value of your portfolio and Selecting new products for development. 

   

It is also a subject of the certified Audio Product Portfolio Management Course that we organise a few times a year.

Pic 3 – BCG Matrix

You can also consider improving your customer onboarding experience (also called FTUX) to lower the cost of acquiring customer (CAC). It can mean improved purchasing process but also having better quality of training materials and finally the design of the product itself. 

Finally, sit down with your sales and product marketing teams and discuss how we can generate more clients and make it cheaper and faster. It can mean including up and down-market strategies which means making versions of products that address other layers of the market – e.g. creating feature-limited cheaper version of the professional audio expensive product for smaller studios or individual creators to ensure higher market penetration but also the opposite – creating enterprise or high end solutions of your products for individuals and teams so you can win really big multimillion deals too. Be careful not to fall into PLG Trap tough. 

Business is not always fun; sometimes it is simply not possible not to fire people. However, those companies who care for their employees and do whatever they can to protect them will always have a great reputation and attract the best talent. Firing experienced employees bears also a hidden cost as it can takes months or even years for new employees to be efficient.

Product leaders are well positioned to drive above changes as they are responsible of the financial results of products and have decisive power too.

Thank you for your attention and hope you won’t have to take decisions to let people go in your career!