Spotify’s recent layoff of 1,500 employees, despite positive earnings, signals a shift in how we view roles like UX research in the tech industry. Drawing parallels with seasonal work, I explore the implications for professionals in non-business crucial roles like ours and ask unpopular questions about investing differently in our research careers.

A few days ago, Spotify’s cofounder and CEO Daniel Ek released this statement to announce that he would be reducing their total headcount by 17%. Ek said the following:

“I recognize this will impact a number of individuals who have made valuable contributions. To be blunt, many smart, talented and hard-working people will be departing us. For those leaving, we’re a better company because of your dedication and hard work. Thank you for sharing your talents with us. I hope you know that your contributions have impacted more than half a billion people and millions of artists, creators, and authors around the world in profound ways.”

What becomes evident is that these layoffs aren’t merely about individual merit but a strategic move towards a more resourceful future. Ek emphasizes a return to Spotify’s roots, highlighting the need for relentless resourcefulness in a landscape where lean operations are no longer an option but a necessity. He explained:

“The decision to reduce our team size is a hard but crucial step towards forging a stronger, more efficient Spotify for the future. But it also highlights that we need to change how we work. In Spotify’s early days, our success was hard won. We had limited resources and had to make the most of every asset. Our ingenuity and creativity were what set us apart. As we’ve grown, we’ve moved too far away from this core principle of resourcefulness. The Spotify of tomorrow must be defined by being relentlessly resourceful in the ways we operate, innovate, and tackle problems. This kind of resourcefulness transcends the basic definition—it’s about preparing for our next phase, where being lean is not just an option but a necessity.”

Resourcefulness as a necessity—as Ek puts it—is not surprising given the numbers. For example, Spotify’s SEC filings show that only a minute percentage of the company’s 2023 Q3 revenue ends up as operating profit. While there might be little room to negotiate with record labels and other rights holders, there seems to be a greater opportunity to reduce other fixed costs such as the headcount to the minimum to increase the net profit.

SITUATING THE SUPPORTING ROLES IN TECH LIKE UX RESEARCH AS SEASONAL WORK

Reading these numbers, many folks might say that Spotify should have hired fewer people in the first place.

I don’t think so. If we draw parallels between Spotify’s approach to hiring and laying off and seasonal work dynamics, we see this: The rapid growth that required a multitude of roles, including UX researchers, mirrors the influx of labor during peak seasons in agriculture. However, as the need for massive innovation subsides, a leaner, more adaptable team remains—a concept reminiscent of seasonal employment.

If we look carefully at the UX research role, we can already see the hardships with showcasing impact and return on investment (ROI) (e.g., so many people wrote relevant pieces on this topic, I recommend starting from this, this, and this). It prompts us to rethink our position, asking whether we’re truly indispensable or merely part of a cyclical demand for innovation.

Farmers’ harvesting the crops in the fall might be a practice not too far from researchers’ delivering insights to inform key decisions. But once the strategy is set and major decisions are taken, non-researchers or only a few full-time researchers could be resourceful and maintain their day-to-day operations without a larger team.

The calculations of layoffs from fDi of Spotify’s total workforce seem to support this view. To be transparent, as I write this article, Spotify hasn’t made public what regions or functions are affected. However, knowing that Spotify’s overexpansion since 2016 focused on research and development (R&D), it’s reasonable to suggest that a significant portion of the workforce affected by the layoffs in 2023 (shown in red in the graph below) came from the R&D function.

Why seasonal workers, not consultants?

By comparing non-business crucial tech roles like UX research to seasonal work rather than consultancy, I emphasize the lack of a safety net for seasonal workers. Unlike consultants, who maintain a client focus, tech employees may feel part of the team until layoffs occur, introducing uncertainty, fear, and low self-esteem (e.g., you might disagree with me, and if so, please challenge me in the comments section).

INVESTING IN A RESEARCHER’S IDENTITY

As professionals in UX research, should we perceive ourselves as indispensable assets or adaptable contributors ready for the next wave of innovation? Let’s leverage the following questions to explore the nuances of this identity crisis and build a more intentional and sustainable career path.

HOW CAN WE CONNECT WITH COMPANIES WHOSE LEADERSHIP NEEDS TO ANSWER THE KIND OF QUESTIONS UX RESEARCHERS ARE SKILLED AND TRAINED TO DO SO?

About two months ago, Erika Hall posted this message on LinkedIn:

This statement—sophisticated in its simplicity—feels timeless. Yet, it hits home especially in today’s tech scene and in cases like Spotify’s recent layoff that largely affects supporting roles like research. A tech company will always need someone to code. But in times of resourcefulness and lean structure, there might genuinely be less interest in learning.

While I don’t disagree with Hall, I recognize that there’s more to the debate than categorizing organizations as those who are prepared to learn and those who aren’t. Rather, a more interesting categorization to make could be: Organizations who need to answer their big questions right now and those who already had their big questions answered. There’s also another category of organizations that don’t care about those big questions.

In that sense, it’s worth asking ourselves and hiring managers the following to understand if the organizations we consider working in are going through a research-friendly phase:

Do they have their strategic questions already answered? Have they already made their big bets? Have they already decided where they want to go and how? What degree of uncertainty is the executive level managing?

Organizations that are not in a learning phase might be content with A/B testing everything. Or they might be satisfied with having non-researchers having conversations with their users. Even if for whatever reason organizations like this might hire full-time UX researchers, it’s no-brainer that they would be the first ones to go when the seasons change.

That’s why it’s worth prioritizing—before accepting any job offers, or even investing time to go through an application process—the companies where there’s a genuine need to hire researchers. If there are foundational questions that need answering, our role as UX researchers could be close enough to business-crucial. Otherwise, even if we are offered a high salary, we would easily be the first ones to go to cut costs.

WHAT ELSE CAN WE DO THAT’S NOT OBVIOUSLY UNDER OUR UX RESEARCHER SCOPE?

Finding room in what executives now call a lean structure is hard for supporting roles because it requires building a direct relationship with creating impact. Impact—a vague term in its nature—tends to boil down to revenue generation in for-profit companies. How directly can someone claim ownership of revenue generation is how much impact they can argue that they make. Spotify’s Ek says it in his own words:

“Today, we still have too many people dedicated to supporting work and even doing work around the work rather than contributing to opportunities with real impact.”

Engineers code. Designers design. Researchers bring insights that—at their worst are irrelevant or already known and at their best helpful and new—help make better decisions. But the decision-makers are the executives from business or product leaders. Not usually UX researchers themselves. In that case, unless the company has a strong teamwork culture, UX researchers’ work can be dismissed and decision-makers could take credit for the value generation.

Then, the questions stay:

What else can researchers do aside from generating insights that can create impact more directly? Is there anything we can do with our skills and experience that’s not obviously under our scope? Can we formulate our work in a way that can argue for its place in a lean structure?

It’s worth studying our stakeholders from business, strategy, and product with close attention to figure out what blocks them. What do they care about but have a hard time doing themselves? Can we claim that body of work, even if that doesn’t obviously fall under what’s known to be our scope (e.g., things we can do when the typical UX research work is off-season)?

We might have some learning to do, and hone our skills in areas where we need to master a new vocabulary or new ways of thinking about our users and organization. But as long as we work in ways that maximize our capabilities as researchers, we can add new skills and experiences under our belt.

WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO BUILD RELATIONSHIPS IN TECH SO THAT WE CAN HAVE A SMOOTH TRANSITION TO OUR NEXT JOB BEFORE OR AROUND WHEN A LAYOFF HAPPENS?

We cannot take our job for granted, especially if we’re in a supporting role. It doesn’t matter if we had stellar performance reviews, and if our organization has a positive earnings report.

So it’s worth forging relationships long before the seasons change (e.g., while we’re still harvesting the crops in the fall). Questions like this might help:

Who are the people I would want to work with sometime in the future (e.g., both leading figures who are well-known as well as folks who worked with me before, engaged with me at conferences or online)? Who are the headhunters or recruiters that are worth building a working relationship independent from if a hiring process works out or not? Who can I learn from? Who cares about achieving a goal that I can help with?

In short, it’s worth nurturing our network before any layoff happens to both find out about opportunities earlier and get referrals.

In this article, I’ve shared how the most recent layoff at Spotify was revealing for folks in non-business crucial roles like UX research. It made our efforts seem more like seasonal work, showing us that factors like the kind of questions an organization needs to answer matter more than our performances.

Keeping that in mind, I’ve offered a few questions we should be asking ourselves if we want to grow as UX researchers in tech organizations (e.g., instead of transitioning to an entirely different role within tech or doing research in a different setup like academia, NGOs, etc).

Just like Spotify’s Ek, I will also bluntly say: We can ask all these questions above, reflect on them, and draft an actionable roadmap for ourselves. Yet, we might still feel the anxiety of being restricted by the boundaries of supporting roles, and feel fearful of being affected by the next wave of layoffs. Even if that were the case, being intentional about how best to invest in our UX research careers and how best to identify work opportunities and resources would help with the challenges ahead.

This article originally appeared on UXDesign.cc on Medium and is reprinted with the author’s permission.