Past year
Holding a team steady through a hard reorg
Engineering Manager
Took a team through a structural reorganisation that reassigned scope, changed reporting lines, and forced a charter rewrite — without losing a single engineer or breaking the delivery cadence.
- Zero regretted attrition through the reorg window
- Charter rewrite landed in 3 weeks instead of the projected 8
- Team velocity recovered within one sprint of the new structure
The reality of a reorg
A reorg is a months-long grief process compressed into a 30-minute town hall. People hear the new boxes and immediately ask the only question that matters to them: what does this mean for me?
The leader’s job is not to deliver the new structure. The leader’s job is to be the person who answers that question, honestly, for every individual on the team — even when the answer is uncomfortable.
What I did
- 1-on-1s within 48 hours. Every engineer, no exceptions. Fifteen minutes minimum, not the usual half hour. The point was signal, not coverage.
- Wrote down what I knew vs. what I did not know. Shared the same document with the team. People can handle uncertainty; they cannot handle false certainty.
- Co-authored the new charter with the senior engineers on the team — they had earned the right, and their fingerprints on the document made it ours, not mine.
- Protected delivery commitments that were already in flight. Reorgs are convenient excuses to drop balls; we did not drop ours.
What I learned
The job in a reorg is not to make people feel good. It is to make them feel seen. The people who feel seen come out the other side trusting you more, even when the news was hard.
A line I keep coming back to
“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” — Maya Angelou
The reorg taught me she was right.