Google Cloud’s Cuts And The Bigger Story: Why UXR Roles Are Disappearing

Google Cloud just laid off all UX researchers below L6 (see here and here). Not some of them. Not a "strategic realignment" of a few teams. All of them. If you were a junior or mid-level UX researcher at Google Cloud, you got a calendar invite that ruined your week, and probably your next few months too.

This wasn't a one-off act of corporate brutality. It's the latest domino in a chain reaction that's been rattling through the tech industry like a game of layoff whack-a-mole. Meta cut researchers. Amazon cut researchers. Microsoft cut researchers. Startups you've never heard of cut researchers you'll never meet. The message is clear: UX research, once the darling of human-centered design, is now getting dumped like a boyfriend who talks too much about his feelings.

The Pattern: It's Not Just You, It's Everyone

Let's zoom out for a second. This isn't about one company having a bad quarter or a rogue VP with a vendetta against Post-it notes. This is an industry-wide reckoning. Across Big Tech and beyond, UX research functions are being deprioritized, downsized, or straight-up eliminated. The cuts aren't random either. They're strategic, in the most ruthless sense of the word. Companies are keeping their senior and principal researchers (the L6s and up, the gray-haired wizards who have "strategic" in their titles), while showing everyone else the door.

The model that dominated the 2010s (embed a researcher in every product pod, democratize insights, champion the user at every turn) is being replaced by something far leaner and, frankly, colder. Centralized research teams. Outsourced vendors. The occasional "research sprint" when someone remembers users exist. If you're a mid-level researcher who thought you'd climb the ladder by doing great work, surprise: the ladder just got sawed in half.

Why UXR Feels Expendable to Executives

Here's the uncomfortable truth: to a lot of executives, UX research looks like a luxury. It's the tote bag of corporate functions. Nice to have, makes you feel good about yourself, but when you're trying to hit your quarterly numbers and the market's in freefall, the tote bag goes in the donation pile.

The problem is ROI. Or rather, the perception of ROI. Engineering ships features. Sales brings in revenue. AI infrastructure (the current golden child) promises to revolutionize everything and make shareholders weep with joy. UX research? It produces slide decks. It tells you things you might already suspect. It surfaces inconvenient truths about users who, let's be honest, are going to use the product anyway because what choice do they have? It's not like they're going to switch to a competitor. Right?

This is, of course, a deeply stupid way to think about research. But we're not talking about what's smart. We're talking about what happens when finance people run the numbers and someone has to be the sacrificial lamb. UX research doesn't ship products. It doesn't close deals. And in a downturn, "non-essential" is just corporate speak for "you're fired."

The perception problem runs deep. A product manager can point to a feature launch. A designer can point to a beautiful interface. A researcher points to... insights? Recommendations that may or may not have been implemented? A 40-slide deck that three people read? The work is invisible until something goes catastrophically wrong, and even then, nobody connects the dots back to the research team that was cut six months earlier.

The Structural Forces Eating UXR Alive

But wait, there's more! It's not just about short-term thinking. There are deeper, structural forces at play, and they're all working against UX research at once like some kind of corporate Voltron of bad news.

First, there's the AI hype train, and it's going full speed with no brakes. Executives are convinced (or at least, they're convincing themselves) that they don't need researchers to understand users anymore. Why pay someone to conduct interviews when you can just analyze user logs? Why do field studies when you've got A/B testing? Why employ humans when ChatGPT can summarize customer support tickets and call it "user insights"? Never mind that none of these things actually replace the deep, contextual understanding that comes from real research. The narrative is too seductive: AI can do it faster, cheaper, and without asking for dental benefits.

Second, there's the maturity curve problem. A lot of these companies have been around for 10, 15, even 20 years now. They've done thousands of studies. They've interviewed millions of users. They've A/B tested every button color known to humankind. At some point, leadership starts thinking, "We know our users now. We've figured it out. Why do we still need a research team?" It's the corporate equivalent of saying you don't need to go to the doctor anymore because you've been healthy for a while. Sure, what could go wrong?

Third, and this one stings: mid-level headcount is expensive, and companies don't want to fund what they see as a training ground. Below-L6 roles are where people learn the craft, build their portfolios, and develop the skills to become senior researchers. But in a cost-cutting climate, those positions look like apprenticeships, and apprenticeships cost money. Why invest in developing talent when you can just... not? Hire a couple of expensive senior people, outsource the rest, and call it efficiency. The fact that this creates a massive pipeline problem for the future? Not this quarter's problem, friend.

What Happens to Products When Research Dies

Here's where things get spicy. When you cut research, you don't just lose people. You lose the user's voice in the room. And products without user input start to look, well, a lot like each other.

We're already seeing the homogenization. Every app is starting to feel the same. Every interface follows the same patterns. Every feature set is driven by what analytics say people click on, not what people actually need. Design decisions get made in conference rooms by people who haven't talked to a user in months (or ever). The result? Products that work fine for the average user in the Bay Area but fall apart for anyone else. Products that solve problems engineers think are important but ignore the issues people actually have. Products that are technically impressive but emotionally hollow.

And here's the kicker: analytics can tell you what people do, but they can't tell you why. You can see that users drop off at step three of your checkout flow, but without research, you're just guessing about why. Maybe the button's in the wrong place. Maybe the copy is confusing. Maybe your users don't trust you with their credit card because your site looks like it was designed by a committee of robots (it was). Without researchers to investigate, you're flying blind, making changes based on hunches and hoping something sticks.

The risk is especially high for global products or features aimed at underrepresented markets. When you cut research, you cut the people who were making sure your product works for more than just the default user. You lose the folks who were catching the assumptions, the biases, the blind spots. What you're left with is a product built by a narrow slice of humanity for an even narrower slice of humanity. Good luck with that global expansion.

Who Survives the Purge (And How)

Not everyone's getting cut, of course. Some researchers are not just surviving but thriving. Let's talk about who makes it through and why, because there's a pattern here too.

Senior and principal researchers with direct exec visibility are basically immune. If you're presenting to the C-suite, if you're in the room when strategy gets decided, if your name is known three levels up, you're golden. These are the researchers who've learned to speak the language of business, who can tie every study to revenue or risk avoided, who've positioned themselves as strategic advisors rather than service providers.

Then there are the mixed-methods generalists who can do it all. These are the Swiss Army knives of UX research: qual, quant, usability, strategic, tactical, whatever you need. More importantly, they can connect their work directly to business outcomes. They're not just running studies; they're preventing million-dollar mistakes. They're not just gathering insights; they're identifying new revenue opportunities. They've figured out that in this climate, you need to be able to say "this research saved us X dollars" or "this insight generated Y in new revenue," and you need receipts.

Finally, researchers embedded in revenue-critical areas have some protection. If you're doing research on ads, offers, checkout flows, retention, or anything else that directly impacts the money printer, you're more valuable. Companies will cut a lot of things, but they're hesitant to mess with the machinery that generates cash. If you can position yourself in one of these areas, your odds improve dramatically.

The Profession at a Crossroads

What we're witnessing isn't just a wave of layoffs. It's a fundamental repositioning of what UX research is supposed to be. The profession is being forced to evolve or die, and the direction of that evolution is pretty clear: from "advocates for users" to "strategic advisors tied to monetization."

This isn't necessarily bad, but it's definitely different. The idealistic vision of UX research (giving voice to the user, championing accessibility, making products that genuinely improve people's lives) is giving way to something more pragmatic and, let's be honest, more mercenary. The researchers who survive are the ones who can prove their value in dollars and cents, who can sit at the strategy table without flinching, who can talk about business objectives as fluently as they talk about user needs.

For early and mid-career researchers, this creates a brutal bottleneck. It's harder to break into the field. There are fewer entry-level positions. The traditional career ladder (junior researcher to mid-level to senior to principal) is collapsing. Companies want senior people who can hit the ground running, but they're not willing to develop the talent that would eventually fill those roles. It's a snake eating its own tail, and it's not sustainable.

We're likely heading toward a bifurcation of the profession. On one side, a small elite group of highly paid, strategically positioned researchers who work in-house at major companies. On the other side, a growing ecosystem of contractors, agencies, consultants, and freelancers who get brought in for specific projects and then cut loose. The middle, where most researchers used to live, is vanishing.

The Bigger Question Nobody's Asking

Here's what keeps me up at night: if tech companies cut research too deep, do they hollow out their capacity for long-term innovation?

User research isn't just about preventing bad decisions (though it's great at that). It's about discovering new possibilities. It's about understanding needs people can't articulate. It's about seeing around corners. When you cut research, you don't just lose risk mitigation. You lose the ability to surprise and delight. You lose the insights that lead to breakthrough products rather than incremental improvements to existing ones.

UX without UXR risks becoming "design without users." You end up with beautiful interfaces that solve the wrong problems. Elegant solutions to issues nobody has. Products that look great in demos but fall apart in real life. And sure, you can survive that way for a while, especially if you've got a monopoly or network effects on your side. But eventually, someone who actually listened to users is going to eat your lunch.

These layoffs aren't just about jobs, brutal as that is for the people losing them. They're about whether the user's voice survives in product development. They're about whether tech companies still believe that understanding humans is important when building products for humans. Right now, the answer seems to be: only if you can prove it in a spreadsheet.

The irony is rich. These are the same companies that built their empires by obsessing over users, by making products that people loved, by caring deeply about the human experience. Now they're betting they can coast on that legacy while cutting the very people who kept them connected to reality.

Maybe they're right. Maybe they've figured it all out and research is genuinely redundant at this point. Or maybe, just maybe, we're about to find out what happens when you stop listening to users because you thought you knew better. Spoiler alert: it usually doesn't end well.

But hey, at least the quarterly numbers will look good.

🎯 UXR gets cut when it cannot prove money or mitigate risk
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