I’ve written about the layoff already, and this is the last post about it. What I want to write about is what I’ve been doing since. And if you’re in the middle of it right now, maybe some of this helps.
There were four stages for me. They came in that order, more or less, and a few of them overlapped. I’m still in the last one.
The quiet. After eight years at Disney, my role was gone. I told people I’d be fine and I meant it. What I remember most is people telling me I deserved a break, that I should take some time for myself. Then the quiet set in. It wasn’t just that first week. It was the rest of April and into May, and that’s when it became real. I had been looking forward to being back in the office with my colleagues, and that went away with the role.
The search. Looking at other people’s resumes online got me thinking about where the last eight years actually went. They went into Disney+, and I wanted that to show, along with how much that time meant to me. I also knew I could build something myself, so my resume became a streaming site. Then I applied to a lot of roles and took a lot of calls. Friends and former colleagues checked in on me through all of it, some weekly and some daily, over LinkedIn, over text, and in person. Those messages meant a lot. Thank you.
The low. This part was harder than I expected. Roles I applied for got filled, and recruiters stopped answering. A lot of what did come in was people posing as recruiters who only wanted my personal information, and sorting the real messages out from those took real time. The rest of it is harder to explain. Some of it was psychological, and some of it I still can’t name. There was something special about working for a place that everyone loves, and then one day it was gone. That sat uneasy in my stomach.
Building. I never took that break. Ten days after the layoff I was building again, and I haven’t stopped since. This is where I picked myself back up. Some of it started before I left. In my last stretch at Disney I was one of a small group of TPMs leading AI adoption across our program management organization, and I helped my own team pick up these tools. I’m thankful my manager and my team gave me that opportunity. After the layoff I started going to AI developer events around San Francisco, Cursor and Claude among them. After all those quiet weeks, those rooms were the opposite, full of people making things. I’m lucky to live near where so much of this is being built, and I’ve been part of that community ever since. Sitting with the people building it, watching the landscape change month to month, has been incredible. The part I missed most after the layoff was working on something with other people, and building in the open gave me that back. It has given me a new life.
You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.
—Steve Jobs, Stanford, 2005
What I’ve been making
I work as a program manager, a designer, and someone who builds the thing himself. What follows is what that has looked like since April.
DPM is short for Design Program Management. It comes out of the work I’ve done for years, and I built all of it myself, the process model and the code. I wanted to make the tool for the discipline I practice.
CyberRuler is a native macOS app I wrote in Swift. It’s the on screen rulers, guides, and loupe I wanted on my own desk, so I built them instead of paying for them.
I also stood up my own practice. Studio Practice is the name on all of it now, and it’s how I take on client work, web audits, and sites.
And there’s this paper. The Dispatch runs on software I wrote, on a domain I own, and no platform decides who gets to see it.
I didn’t plan any of this. One project led to the next one, and some weeks all of them need me at once.
Where I am now
The difference lately is that the work brings people in. It has started conversations I never would have had, and some of those turned into real connections. A few came from readers who found the paper and wrote to me. There are a few doors I’m not going to talk about here.
None of that came from an application. I built in the open where people could find it, and every opportunity that has mattered since April started with something I made.
None of this means I’ve stopped looking. I want my next role, and I’m having those conversations now. What I build on my own is what I would bring to it.
I’m not going to call the layoff a gift, because it wasn’t. But I’m in a better place now than I was in April.
If you’re going through this right now, keep going. Stay curious, keep learning, and build something where people can see it. Find the rooms where others are doing the same. That’s what moved me out of the low.
Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.
—Steve Jobs, Stanford, 2005