If HubSpot's restructuring this month cost you your manager seat, the memo already tells you what to change on your resume. HubSpot cut about 660 roles (roughly 7%) and scored every role against criteria that included "layers and spans." American Express cut about 3,500 jobs this month for the same stated reason. A resume that leads with "managed managers" describes the exact role these companies just removed. A resume that leads with shipped work and a wide set of direct reports describes the role they're keeping.
What did HubSpot, Amex and Kroger actually cut this month?
They cut management layers specifically, not just headcount. HubSpot and American Express both named layers and spans of control as the target, and Kroger is shrinking its corporate staff by more than a third over three years.
- HubSpot is cutting nearly 660 employees, about 7% of its workforce, to build "a flatter organization with fewer management layers." CEO Yamini Rangan's memo says every role was assessed against six criteria: strategic need, layers and spans, drive revenue, capability, capacity, and leadership. She also said the cuts were "not driven by AI-related efficiencies." Charges run $65 million to $75 million, mostly severance, with a minimum of 20 weeks of base pay.
- American Express is cutting roughly 3,500 of its 78,000 jobs. CEO Stephen Squeri and CFO Christophe Le Caillec described it as removing management layers to prepare for AI. Leadership said the company needs "fewer management layers and wider spans of control." The AP called it Amex's first major round of job cuts in about a decade.
- Kroger under CEO Greg Foran is taking its corporate workforce from about 8,200 to 5,200 over three years. It's the fourth round of Kroger corporate cuts since February 2025, and by far the largest.
None of this is new, exactly. Citi went from 13 management layers to eight. UPS cut 12,000 of its 85,000 managers. Korn Ferry found 41% of surveyed professionals said their companies reduced management layers in 2024. What's new is that the selection criteria are now public, so you can write to them.
Why does "managed managers" now hurt a manager resume?
In a flattening, a manager of managers is the layer being removed, and a manager with many individual contributors is the role being widened. "Span of control" is the number of people who report directly to you. HubSpot rated it and Amex said it wants more of it, so your resume should show it plainly.
Read these two lines the way a hiring manager at a newly flattened company would:
- "Managed 3 managers across an org of 40." That reads as a layer: one more hop between the work and the decision.
- "Led 8 direct ICs; personally shipped the billing migration." That reads as the wide span they want, held by someone who still does the work.
The first line used to be the promotion signal. Headcount owned was a proxy for trust. Once companies started counting layers as a cost, that proxy turned around. Total org size now tells a recruiter how much hierarchy you sat on top of. Direct reports plus hands-on output tells them how much you'd get done on a flat team.
Headcount owned used to prove you were trusted. In a flattening, it proves you were a layer.
Do player-coach jobs actually use the title "player-coach"?
Almost never: most player-coach jobs are posted under an ordinary manager title. In Refolk's index of professional profiles, only 362 US profiles hold a "Tech Lead Manager," "Player-Coach" or "Working Manager" title, compared with 43,215 holding "Engineering Manager." A player-coach is a manager who also does individual-contributor work: writing code, running analyses, shipping designs.
Against 43,215 current Engineering Managers in Refolk's index, roughly 119 to 1.
Here's the full ladder from three queries on Refolk's index, US current titles only:
| Rung | US profiles | Ratio to TLM |
|---|---|---|
| Tech Lead Manager / Player-Coach / Working Manager | 362 | 1x (base) |
| Director + Sr. Director of Engineering | 25,422 | ~70x |
| Engineering Manager | 43,215 | ~119x |
Title matching is inclusive, so treat these as directional rather than a census. The EM count picked up a few CTO and "Managing Director Engineering" titles. Even so, the gap is too wide to explain away.
Where those titles sit matters too. The formal "Tech Lead Manager" title clusters at Google (5 profiles in the top-company sample) and Meta (4). It's mostly a big-company label. The Engineering Manager sample, meanwhile, includes startups like HeyGen and Mintlify alongside Databricks, Apple, Chewy and ŌURA. At a startup the EM is often the player-coach. The posting just doesn't say so.
So if you search job boards for "player-coach," you'll miss most of the market. And if you're waiting for a title to signal that you're hands-on, it won't. The proof has to be in your bullets.
Should a laid-off senior manager aim for Director next?
A laid-off senior manager probably shouldn't default to Director, because it's the more crowded tier and the one where hiring fell hardest. Refolk's index shows only about 1.7 Engineering Manager profiles per Director-titled profile, and Revelio found senior-leader hiring fell 57% at its low point, against 43% for middle managers.
That means a lot of Director-titled people chasing fewer Director openings, and every manager this fall's cuts push out competes for the same thin set of roles. The hands-on EM role and the staff IC role are where most of the openings are.
Two moves usually beat a straight step up:
- Sideways into a hands-on EM role. Same title, smaller span of managers (ideally zero), more direct ICs, and you write code or do the craft work part of the week.
- Across into a staff or principal IC role. If you were a strong IC before managing, this is a real option, and your management years count as cross-team influence.
Because there are about 119 Engineering Managers for every Tech Lead Manager title, search by the plain manager title and read each description for hands-on signals.
How do you rewrite a manager resume after a layoff?
Lead with span of control and shipped work, then describe outcomes in customer terms instead of org-chart terms. Each bullet should show what you personally built or decided, how many people reported to you directly, and what changed for the customer or the business.
Put direct reports and hands-on time in the summary line
Your top two lines are where a recruiter decides which kind of manager you are. Write something like: "Engineering manager, 8 direct ICs, roughly half my week hands-on in the payments codebase." If you can't honestly claim hands-on time, don't fake it. Lead with the widest span you held and the most technical decision you owned.
Rewrite org-chart bullets as outcome bullets
HubSpot reorganized product teams around customer outcomes instead of individual "Hubs," with each team owning the full customer journey. A bullet like "Led the Sales Hub team" describes the structure they just took apart. A bullet like "Owned onboarding conversion end to end, +X%" describes how they now organize.
| Before (reads as a layer) | After (reads as a player-coach) |
|---|---|
| Managed 3 managers, org of 40 | Led 8 direct ICs across two squads; flattened to one reporting line |
| Led the Sales Hub team | Owned trial-to-paid conversion end to end, +X% |
| Oversaw platform roadmap | Wrote the design doc and first PRs for the queue rewrite |
| Drove hiring for 15 roles | Hired 6 engineers; ran every technical loop myself |
Fill the X with your real number. If you don't have one, name the shipped artifact instead. A specific shipped thing beats a vague percentage.
Mix IC verbs into manager bullets
The engineering manager resume that wins individual-contributor credibility uses IC verbs: wrote, built, debugged, profiled, shipped, reviewed. Aim for at least one in every role's top three bullets. Keep "managed" and "oversaw" for the lines that actually need them.
Doing this by hand for every posting gets old fast. One company wants "span of 8+," another wants "hands-on coding," a third wants "full-funnel ownership." That's the exact work Refolk takes off you: paste the posting and get your own resume back, rewritten from your real history to lead with the span and shipped work that job asks for.
Will middle-manager hiring come back?
Don't plan around it: the evidence says management flattening is structural, not cyclical. Amex is cutting while profit grows, and middle-manager postings stayed down even after hiring for almost everyone else recovered.
The numbers, with dates:
- U.S. middle-management job postings were about 42% lower in late 2025 than at their April 2022 peak, per Revelio Labs. That figure is roughly a year old, so read it as a trend line, not this month's reading.
- After a broad rebound in postings for nearly every group, middle managers were the exception. At the low point, middle-manager hiring was down 43% and senior-leader hiring down 57%.
- Amex's Q3 net income rose 28% to $3.7 billion, and the company announced cuts anyway.
Layers are being removed in good quarters too, which makes this structural.
When a profitable company removes layers, those seats don't come back with the next good quarter. A lot of managers laid off this fall will spend months applying to Director and Senior Manager postings, polishing the same "led an org of 40" resume, and hearing nothing. It's not that they're unqualified. They're applying to the tier that shrank most, with a resume that describes the role being cut.
The fix isn't waiting. Retitle your story around what flatter companies are keeping, and point your search at the hands-on EM and staff IC roles where the openings actually are.
FAQ
What is a player-coach resume?
A player-coach resume is a manager's resume that leads with hands-on output and direct reports instead of total headcount or managers managed. It puts shipped work, technical decisions and span of control in the top lines, so a flatter company can see you'll carry individual-contributor work as well as lead people. Most of these roles are posted as plain "Engineering Manager" jobs, so the resume has to make the case on its own.
Should I remove "managed managers" from my resume entirely?
No, but move it down and give it context. If you managed managers, say so in one line, then lead with the widest span of direct ICs you held and the work you shipped yourself. If your last role was purely managing managers, reach back to an earlier role where you were hands-on and make sure that experience is visible near the top.
How do I mention the HubSpot or Amex layoff on my resume?
Keep the role with real start and end dates, and don't explain the layoff in your bullets. If it comes up in an interview, one sentence is enough: the company removed management layers in its October restructuring and your role was one of them. Then turn to what you shipped there, which is the part that matters to a flatter employer.