Culture Amp layoffs 2026

The leadership read

A second round of cuts under a new CEO is a structurally different event from a first round. The first round can be inherited from prior leadership and framed as cleanup; the second is the new leader's own statement about what the business actually is. For Culture Amp, 70 additional roles removed means the restructuring is not a one-time correction but an active repositioning: the cost base, the product surface, or the go-to-market motion (likely some combination) did not reach equilibrium in the first pass. That creates a company operating in a sustained state of structural uncertainty, which carries real consequences for retention of the non-departed, customer confidence in roadmap continuity, and the credibility of whatever growth thesis the new CEO is now executing against. This is one of 12 layoff signals we have tracked across sectors in the last 90 days. The HR-tech and enterprise SaaS slice of that count is thin in direct comparables, but the broader pattern is consistent: Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon have each run multiple reduction cycles since 2022, and Dentsu APAC is executing ongoing cuts against declining organic growth. Across that set, the recurring shape is contraction first, strategic repositioning second, and selective rebuilding third, with the gap between the second and third stages often longer than leadership anticipates. Companies reaching this stage of multi-round restructuring in B2B SaaS face concentrated demand for commercial leadership able to stabilise and re-expand revenue without the headcount assumptions of the prior growth model, alongside product operations capability that can deliver roadmap commitments from a smaller engineering base. The market is moving toward operators who can hold customer relationships through organisational turbulence rather than those who built pipelines in more expansionary conditions.