I’ve been through this before.
At Dropbyke, we ran out of runway while the product was still finding its footing. At Voymigo, I built features for a travel market that was still finding its legs. At Entrepreneur First in 2019, half the cohort pivoted their entire thesis in the first month. Uncertainty isn’t a 2023 thing. It’s a startup thing that finally hit big companies too.
The layoffs, budget cuts, and strategic pivots of early 2023 feel familiar to anyone who has founded something. The difference is scale. When it’s your five-person startup, you talk it through over coffee. When it’s a 200-person engineering org, the communication problem compounds fast.
What Your Team Actually Needs
When things get uncertain, engineers ask the same four questions no matter the company:
What matters right now? How stable is the direction? Do I have any say in this? And does my daily work actually connect to something real?
These aren’t complicated needs. They just become urgent when the floor is shifting. You don’t need perfect answers. You need consistent signals.
At the fintech startup, when we had to make hard prioritization calls, the single most useful thing I did was be direct about what we weren’t going to build. People can handle “we aren’t doing X and here is why.” They can’t handle silence followed by a surprise reorg.
Communication Is the Whole Job
When I was working with larger organizations, I noticed something: the engineering leaders who struggled most were the ones who communicated least. Not because they were hiding things, but because they were waiting for certainty before saying anything.
That’s backwards. In uncertain times, the absence of communication is the communication. And what it communicates is “nobody knows and nobody is in charge.”
A simple pattern that works: here is what we know and why it matters, here is what we don’t know and when we’ll revisit it, here are the decisions that flow from this context.
Say it every week. Even if nothing changed. Especially if nothing changed. That consistency is what creates trust.
Stop Starting, Start Stopping
When budgets tighten, the instinct is to do more with less. That’s wrong. The correct move is to do less, better.
Ask three questions about every active project: Does it protect or grow the core business? What happens if we ship it versus if we delay it? Is there a smaller version that delivers the essential outcome?
If the answers are weak, pause the project. Explicitly. Not a quiet death by resource starvation, but a clear “we’re stopping this because we need to focus.” Teams respect that. They don’t respect the slow fade where a project is technically alive but has no one working on it.
The Standards That Can’t Flex
Pressure invites shortcuts. Some shortcuts are fine. Ship with less documentation. Defer the refactor. Reduce scope on a feature.
But some things are non-negotiable: security practices, code review on critical paths, and operational ownership for anything in production. When you cut those, you create compounding debt that hits you exactly when you can least afford it.
The tradeoff isn’t quality versus speed. It’s being explicit about where quality is required and where flexibility exists.
Resilience Isn’t a Motivational Poster
Resilience is operational. Cross-train key responsibilities so a single absence doesn’t stall the team. Keep critical knowledge written down, not just in someone’s head. Maintain a pace that doesn’t depend on perpetual urgency.
I learned this the hard way at Dropbyke. We had one person who understood the payment integration end to end. When they were out for a week, we couldn’t debug a billing issue that was actively losing us users. Never again.
The Point
Leading through uncertainty isn’t about having the answers. It’s about creating enough clarity for good work to happen and enough honesty for trust to survive.
That’s it. No framework. No manifesto. Just be direct, make decisions visible, protect focus, and hold the line on the things that matter. It isn’t glamorous, but it’s what works.