How to lead your team through a bear market
How to lead your team through a bear market
Has your team been affected by layoffs or resignations?
Hey there 👋🏼
Let me start by wishing you a happy and productive 2023!
I thought a lot about how to start 2023 and the topic I want to discuss in the newsletter and decided on the current market conditions and how it affects our ability to lead Engineering Teams.
Let's do a quick overview of the last few years.
The Tech Industry was clearly affected by the pandemic. From the top of my head, this timeline comes to mind:
Remote work vs Office work
Companies had conditions to hire around the world. Filtering is applied by timezone and not the country of residence.
The democratisation of wages, having top talent from smaller countries paid big country salaries.
Revenue spiked due to everyone being at home and doing online shopping
Hiring market frenzy. So many offers!
Companies scaled up with fresh revenue and product possibilities
Revenue dropped when customers went back to their everyday lives
Hiring market freeze.
Companies couldn't support the new structure due to the lack of consistent revenue.
Massive layoffs.
It almost feels like a bubble bursting!
Looking at the last couple of years, I see that what remained from this crazy rollercoaster were the following expectations:
Remote or hybrid work
Async work
Top tier salaries
As an Engineering Leader focusing on your team, how can you cope with these fluctuations that affect your team? From layoffs to individuals leaving in pursuit of better salaries?
Let me go on a tangent and stress that even though many companies are doing layoffs, some great companies still hire with impressive conditions.
How often have we heard the old saying, "we have to do more with less"? I'll try my best not to say it here because I despise it.
I would rather say: let's change our approach and change the underlying conditions.
Seeing your team shrink is tough for anyone, but it is also the ultimate opportunity for you to review these topics:
Find your Top Talent
Tweak your processes
Revisit your Priorities
Understand your Customer Expectations
Find your Top Talent
Start by asking yourself this question.
Do you know who your top talent is?
You must start this process by clearly defining the individuals on which your product, service, and output depend.
Yes, making this list sucks.
And yes, it makes you look at your team from another perspective.
But what if you have to cut X% of the team? Or what if you can only give raises to one or two people? How will you make this decision?
Support this decision with data, from performance analysis, to how knowledgeable these individuals are of the technology their working on and the specific use case you have at your company. These are the last and toughest line of defence.
Again, this is a challenging list to do. You'll often find it unfair, but this list will only help you see your team clearer and prepare for possible turmoils.
Be ready for a rainy day.
Tweak your Processes
Here I diverge from the whole "do more with less".
Before going on a hiring spree and asking your team to sacrifice their personal lives for the job, we are responsible for thinking differently.
A McKinsey study states that developers spend as little as 50% doing actual development in large tech companies. Now, this is something we must focus on.
Increase your team's productivity not by asking them to work more hours but by sitting down and revisiting how they can make their schedule more productive.
Immediate actions that come to mind:
Do you need all those weekly recurring meetings? Does everyone need to attend? Please think of how expensive and time-consuming they are.
Review your agile ways. The idea of agile can be great but can also be an overload of meetings.
Are your processes optimised? How can you invest in automation and freeing your developers from boring and repetitive tasks?
Can you move towards async work more? Forcing everyone to move synchronously means that your optimisations will only help some.
Again, it's not about doing more with less. It's about doing things differently and optimising your process.
Revisit your Priorities
Inevitably you will reach a point where you have optimised as much as possible, and your team is still underwater.
This is the moment to have an honest conversation about priorities and roadmap adjustment.
Contrary to popular belief, your team can't keep delivering the same amount of work if their balance is thrown off:
People leaving the team
A lot of people joining the team
The constant change in the roadmap
A lot of unplanned work
You need to sit down and revisit your priorities and the team's roadmap at these moments. Find the impact of each of your team's initiatives and select the most impactful ones.
Please don't wait until your team is already late to deliver their current work to start taking action.
Roadmap analysis should already be part of your routine.
Understand your Customer Expectations
Finally, get this in your head.
Customers don't care that your team is losing people.
They just want to use your product.
If you can't deliver, someone else will.
I can't stress enough how important it is to know your customers and understand what they need from you.
This knowledge helps you make clear and informed decisions about your true priorities.
Talk to your product managers, or straight to your customers through surveys or even reach out directly, especially if you're still at a stage where you know who your customers are.
These are just a few strategies for coping with the ups and downs that the Tech Industry is suffering right now.
What other strategies would you add? Drop me a message on Twitter 🐦
Finally, if you are wondering why you didn't receive the newsletter last Friday but Monday morning, we can make a bigger impact on your week if you read it on Monday alongside your morning coffee! ☕️
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Thank you for being part of my journey!
Have an incredible week! 💪🏼
Parada 👊🏼 A Leader's Mindset