How did Docker rebuild company culture after a significant reduction in workforce?

It was quite challenging for the team. Up until that day in November 2019, people thought the company was fine, their options were growing in value, and we were on the right path. With something as significant as a restructure, you obviously can't communicate in all-hands meetings and emails and such to the employee base.

Step one was all about rebuilding trust. We were hyper transparent about everything going on. We were sharing everything with the employees in terms of where things stood from a cash balance sheet, revenue standpoint, and revenue growth standpoint. That was the start and it didn't happen overnight.

Second was about learning from the challenges of Docker’s 1.0 focus. We had many different customers, many different buyers, many different users in the previous version of Docker. We simplified it by saying, "We're going to serve developers, first and foremost."

Doing that clarified a lot, and when you shrink from over 400 people down to about 60, you need to simplify the business and the focus. 

"Is this going to serve developers?" became the North Star question of every activity we did. That then circled back to the previous thread: "Is this going to serve developers in an authentic bottoms up product-led growth motion?"

Not everyone was on board with that. They appreciated the transparency but they went, "I really want to work on this problem that's not a developer-centric problem," Or, "I really want to contribute to this open source community which is no longer as critical." 

But it simplified things a lot, got us aligned, made it clearer how we make decisions and how to decide priorities. We were just going to be laser-like focused on this community in a bottom-up, go-to-market motion. 

Over time, as that flywheel started spinning and success came in, it gave the internal team confidence. Others from the outside then saw that as well and had the confidence to join us despite the noise and the press around the restructuring in 2019—which, if you go back and Google it, practically everyone said that we were dead.

Those were the first two big things—rebuild trust with the team, and simplify. 

The third thing was to then iterate quickly, show results, and play those back to build confidence within the team that we're on the right track.