Webflow

Webflow has a lot of awesome benefits

• Remote company with a headquarters in San Francisco
• Fully covered health and medical benefits
• Stipends, until they were done away with a while ago. Now the funds are given directly to employees
• Occasional off-sites and company get-togethers annually
• Organized and structured engineering teams with distinct responsibilities such as Developer Operations, Developer Experience, Product Teams, etc.

A former pro would be Truly caring and positive culture, very human-centric organization where employees could do their best work and be supported by colleagues and the company alike. I can't think of any company that has had a focus on the well-being and happiness of its employees

But this isn't really the case anymore with the change in leadership - see below.

Unfortunately, Webflow has changed quite a bit since the start of the year. Lots of pivots upmarket and new initiatives and a focus on enterprise. This, of course, requires a lot of changes in direction and efforts by relevant teams - such as EPD - and the changes have been quick. This is not the problem itself and such speed and tenacity is needed to remain competitive in this current market.

However, it seems the company is no longer the caring or human-centric company it had been prior. There was a layoff of about 8% of staff at the end of July, with many tenured folks being blindsided by the layoffs.

The company never shared that there was an intention to reduce the workforce, nor offered any restructuring support or lateral moves to the affected teams during the layoff.

They were let go, it seems, without any potential to reconcile with the company or aim for a different role on a different team. No PIPs, no potential to move into a different appropriate position, no real support, but from the announcement, the severance package was one of the better ones as far as tech goes.

Many of those let go were working directly on those upmarket pivots for most of the year, and were let go just as those initiatives were reaching completion, which is strange to say the least.

A company of similar size and stage - Zapier - offered a lot of support to its employees such as secondments and lateral moves to avoid a layoff. You'd have hoped to see similar from Webflow in a layoff that affected 8% of the organization - but nothing. It seemed like an episode right out of Succession when the new CEO informed the team via Slack message.

It's quite a drastic change from a company, and prior CEO, that had always rebuffed that layoffs would be the last chip on the table, and that employees would be taken care of.

In a tech climate experiencing a pullback, and with real worry of revenue dips happening, a layoff is justified and often the necessary move. But this wasn't the case for Webflow; the company reported another record quarter not less than 2 weeks after the layoffs.

The company still has many roles open that are being hired for, roles that potentially could have gone to, or at least attempted to be filled by, affected employees. But this does not seem to be the case, just good and hard-working people laid off in the middle of a record profit quarter.

EPD has gone through several leadership changes, reorganizations of pillars and teams, and some product features and teams eliminated completely.

The churn in Product/Design/Engineering is real - a lot of the time, you'll see that relatively new faces are now just grayscale pictures on Slack profiles. This goes for both middle-layer managers, and ICs.

This should be addressed or talked about - not just avoided and swept under the table.

In addition, the company culture has changed and not for the better, but no one wants to lose their position or be reprimanded, so it stays that way. The layoffs didn't seem like a necessary step, revenue has been good and the product has been growing, but seems like they were done as a show of change and reducing operating costs by new leadership.

Hopefully things improve, but this isn't the Webflow we thought we knew.