ยท 5 min read
Case study: 45 engineers to 22, delivery cadence back in 4 months.
One engagement, told in numbers. B2B SaaS, Series B, Belgian entity. Details are changed enough that the company cannot be recognised; the shape and the orders of magnitude are real.
The starting point
45 engineers across 7 teams, hired in two waves on the back of a growth story that did not land. Releases had slipped from every two weeks to roughly quarterly. Three of the five most senior engineers had interviewed elsewhere in the previous six months. Engineering payroll ran at about EUR 4 000 000 a year fully loaded, against revenue that had grown 20 percent while headcount had grown 180 percent. The board had asked for a plan twice and received a hiring freeze both times.
What the diagnosis found
Three weeks, most of it reading delivery data and sitting in the meetings nobody invites a consultant to. The findings were not exotic:
- Two platform teams, 11 engineers, building infrastructure for a customer profile the company no longer sold to.
- Four managers with 3 or fewer reports, each running a full meeting cadence anyway.
- Ownership had moved from names to teams and stopped there: nobody could name a decision two of the seven teams had made that quarter.
- The product roadmap fit on one page and needed roughly 18 engineers to deliver.
What changed
The cut took the org from 45 to 22 over 9 weeks, run under the Belgian collective-dismissal rules, which set the sequence and the timeline more than the plan did. Teams went from 7 to 4, each with a named lead and a scope short enough to say out loud. Two of the four managers with small teams returned to senior engineering roles; the other two left. The roadmap was cut to what 22 people ship, which turned out to be more than what 45 people had been shipping.
The numbers after 4 months
| Before | After 4 months | |
|---|---|---|
| Engineers | 45 | 22 |
| Teams | 7 | 4 |
| Release cadence | Roughly quarterly | Weekly |
| Engineering payroll, annualised | About EUR 4 000 000 | About EUR 2 000 000 |
| Regretted departures after the cut | 1 in the following 6 months |
What it cost
Severance and the engagement together came to roughly 40 percent of one year of the payroll saving. Payback in under 5 months, which is typical: the money is rarely the hard part of a right-sizing. The hard part is doing it once, cleanly, instead of in three demoralising rounds.
Why it worked
Not because of the spreadsheet. The selection was made on delivery evidence, the exits ran by the book, and the people who stayed heard the reasoning to their faces. The weekly cadence came back because 4 teams with clear scopes coordinate in the hallway, where 7 teams without them coordinate in meetings. If you recognise the starting point, the earlier post on when to right-size covers the signals, and the Renault procedure post covers the Belgian sequence.
Anonymised by design: sector, sizes and timings are shifted, the structure of what happened is not. References, including for this engagement, on the intro call.