EcoCart, a San Francisco-based sustainability software company, used Pigment to restructure their growing team around employee strengths during a period of rapid organizational change. This is the five-step process they built and what they learned.
Who EcoCart Is and What Was Changing
EcoCart is a sustainability software company founded in 2019 that helps ecommerce brands calculate, reduce, and offset the carbon footprint of their orders. Backed by investors including Fifth Wall, Capital One Ventures, and Base10 Partners, the company has raised over $17 million and works with thousands of online retailers.
EcoCart had grown from five people to over 60 in under four years. After closing their Series A, the company expanded into new product lines and added teams across engineering, sales, partnerships, and operations. The org structure that worked at 20 people no longer worked at 60, and teams that had formed organically needed to be restructured around the company's new priorities.
The Challenge: Restructuring for Fit, Not Just Friction
The leadership team knew how restructures usually go. You look at the org chart, identify the least disruptive moves, and make placement decisions based on availability and tenure. The whole process optimizes for minimal friction, not actual fit. And 90 days later, the people who landed in roles that didn't match their strengths start to disengage. Not because they're unhappy with the company. Because nobody had the data to place them well.
This wasn't a hiring or firing decision. Nobody's job was at risk. The question was: given the people we already have, how do we structure teams so that each person is doing work that fits how they actually operate? EcoCart wanted the restructure to work for the people going through it, not just for the org chart.
Why Pigment
EcoCart chose Pigment because it gave the leadership team a way to see their teams as compositions of working styles, not just names on a chart. The assessment identifies how someone communicates, makes decisions, where their strengths have the most impact, and where their blind spots are. Before the restructure, EcoCart wanted that data for every person whose role was about to change.
The Process EcoCart Built
EcoCart turned Pigment into a repeatable playbook for restructuring teams around strengths instead of convenience.
Step 1: Assess Before Deciding
Before finalizing any team structures, EcoCart ran Pigment across every person affected by the restructure. Leadership was clear about what it was and what it wasn't: a resource planning exercise, not a performance evaluation. Nobody was being graded. The goal was to make sure the new structure was built around how people actually work.
Because Pigment is already a consumer product, the experience didn't land like a corporate exercise. People took it on their own time, found the report interesting, and several said they would have taken it regardless of the restructure, just to understand themselves better.
Sample message: "We're restructuring to match where the company is headed. Before we finalize anything, we want to make sure we're placing people where their strengths will have the most impact. This assessment will help us do that."
Step 2: Map Team Compositions
Once the results came back, leadership looked at the proposed teams as a whole before talking to anyone individually. They asked:
- Where are we about to stack a team with people who all communicate and make decisions the same way?
- Is anyone being placed in responsibilities that run against their natural working style?
- Which teams are missing a perspective that would challenge the group's blind spots?
They spotted a team that was about to have four people who all communicated and made decisions the same way, with no one to push back or see what the group was missing. They spotted another case where someone was being placed in a narrowly operational role when their profile pointed to broader, cross-team work. These were mismatches that would have taken months to surface. EcoCart caught them before anyone started.
Step 3: Adjust the Plan Based on the Data
One person was going to be placed on one team by default. The move was the path of least resistance. But their profile showed they would thrive in a different role on a different team, one that matched their strengths and the kind of work that gives them energy. Leadership adjusted the plan. Six months later, that person was a top performer on the team they almost didn't join.
Step 4: Let People See Themselves in the Decision
This was the part the leadership team didn't fully expect.
Everyone who took the assessment received their own report before any placement conversations happened. They read about their strengths, their working style, what energizes them, and where their blind spots are. Overwhelmingly, people agreed with what the report said. They recognized themselves in it. The assessment acted as a healthy mirror, giving each person a baseline for understanding how they work before any organizational decisions were on the table.
There was still a corporate motive behind every move. The company needed people in specific seats. But because the assessment provided a neutral third party's perspective in a consumer-friendly format, leadership could connect a placement to something the person already knew about themselves. The reasoning didn't come from leadership's opinion. It came from a report the employee had already read and agreed with.
The reaction wasn't "this is happening to me." It was "this makes sense. I can see why this team is a better fit for how I work." People weren't just accepting the move. They were agreeing with it. Some were looking forward to it, because someone had taken the time to match them to work that fit them instead of just filling a slot.
That helped the feel of the entire restructure. It stopped being something leadership did to the team and became something the team could see the logic behind.
Step 5: Build a Repeatable Process
EcoCart documented the approach so they could use it again. The next time the company goes through a period of change, they won't be starting from scratch. They have a process: assess, map team compositions, identify mismatches, adjust placements, and explain the reasoning.
For the first time, I could explain why someone was being placed on a particular team, not just that they were being moved. And because they'd taken the assessment themselves, they could see it too. People weren't resisting the change. They were leaning into it.
Peter Twomey, Co-Founder & COO, EcoCartOutcomes: What Changed for People and for the OrganizationFor Individuals
Honest framing: Sometimes the conversation was "we needed someone here," and that was honest. But leadership could add a second layer: "and here's why your strengths are a good fit for this team." Because people had already read their own reports and agreed with the results, that second layer landed.
Confidence in the move: People moved forward with confidence instead of wondering why the decision was made.
For the Organization
Higher retention: Retention after this restructure was meaningfully higher than after previous reorganizations. Fewer voluntary departures in the first six months. Fewer transfer requests in the first 90 days.
Stronger team compositions: Managers reported feeling more confident in their new teams because the reasoning behind each placement was visible.
Resource planning, not evaluation: The whole process was about putting the right people in the right seats, without anyone's employment ever being in question.
Advice from the EcoCart Team
Assess before you decide, not after. The biggest value came from having the data before team structures were finalized. Once moves are announced, it's too late to catch mismatches without creating confusion.
Frame it as resource planning, not evaluation. Nobody's job was at risk. Making that clear from the start, and meaning it, is what got people to engage honestly with the assessment instead of treating it as a test.
Let the consumer experience do the work. Because the assessment doesn't feel like a corporate tool, people actually enjoyed taking it. When people are interested in their own results, they show up to placement conversations with self-awareness instead of defensiveness.
Look at teams, not just individuals. Individual profiles are useful, but the real insight came from seeing how a proposed team's working styles fit together. That's where the blind spots and redundancies showed up.
Let people see themselves in the decision. Because people took the assessment and agreed with their results before any placement conversations happened, the restructure didn't feel like something being done to them. The data was theirs first. When leadership used it to explain a move, the reasoning connected to something people already knew about themselves.
EcoCart treated the restructure as an opportunity to place people where their strengths and working styles would have the most impact. The assessment gave people a baseline they agreed with, leadership a rationale they could explain, and the team a reason to lean into the change instead of resisting it.
