As a nontechnical person, I can say I don't blame co's for cutting these roles first. Marketing, HR, program management, etc. are great at creating additional layers and busywork that makes it seem like they're absolutely critical to a company functioning. I was mostly in sales/bd and what I did love about the job was that there were pretty objective criteria to look at to see performance- how many partnerships or deals were in the pipeline, how many did you close, what dollar value, what was the csat on closed deals, etc.
I don't disagree on cutting these roles first, but I don't think it's a function of these roles being non-important; rather when a company stops growing these roles have less utility. Less about the role and more about the company priorities which shift when growth stalls. No one is sales is going to advocate for less marketing spend.
Program managers have very little utility. Ops should really be automated (i.e. it should be half run by SWEs that automate everything they can), so real ops headcount should stay constant as the company grows as automation is increased. I would hope marketing is data driven on things like CAC, but who knows at a lot of companies. Lots of marketing people are not quantitatively fluent.
