Incubator teams like this rarely lack knowledge redundancy. I highly doubt a single one of the people laid off had silo’d knowledge or worked solo on any mainline components.

Let’s say they were testing a new Camera subsystem. The results weren’t promising. So they choose to stick with porting the legacy subsystem; well, losing that team isn’t a loss and doesn’t have much effect on velocity or knowledge coverage.

I’m just making assumptions here, but the higher ups almost definitely had many meetings with the management and product teams to decide what was and wasn’t needed and who was “expendable” (I hate HR terms/dehumanization, but this is almost definitely how it was presented) before making their list. Is there a likelihood this would affect the velocity or direction of the project? Sure. But I don’t read losing 15% of an experimental team as deprioritizing it, but more mainlining it (based on my personal experience and knowledge of the subject).

> I’m just making assumptions here, but the higher ups almost definitely had many meetings with the management and product teams to decide what was and wasn’t needed and who was “expendable” (I hate HR terms/dehumanization, but this is almost definitely how it was presented) before making their list.

From what I heard most managers were not consulted ahead of time.