Hello, everyone. Thank you for coming to my session executing in times of chaos. I'm Swathi. Uh I'm currently an engineering leader at benchling before that. I used to be at Uber and Microsoft. Let's dive right in chaos.There is so much that happens in the life of an engineering leader. Changes are not actually as uncommon or unprecedented as people think it is personally. For me, these are the subset of changes I've been through over the last 2 to 3 years, been through roughly about three layoffs, two strategy shifts, five new managers and three rears over the course of 2 to 3 years. Um Every change affects me and my team and I'm sure you all have gone through your fair share of like chaos in the last couple of years too. So if you are comfortable sharing, how has your journey been, uh how have you been navigating chaos in the chat? Definitely go for it. Um But something that's common about chaos is each of these changes has an effect on me and my team. It basically takes a step backwards from where we are and what we are doing and makes us pause and figure out what do we do next? Chaos by definition means it's going to be ambiguous, it's going to be unpredictable, it is going to be out of control.

Um There is, it also means there are no clear answers, there are no known outcomes that you can just follow the rulebook for. But what can you do in that case to not only support yourself but also to support your team? Um not only to help them survive but actually thrive through the chaos. How can you continue to execute when there is so much noise that's happening? Let me share four steps to follow as a leader to cut through the noise and to continue to deliver value for the business. One is check your pulse. That's the first and foremost, you have to wear an oxygen mask before you can help others. If not, the entire team is gonna be drowning. Second, communicate openly, communication is key. What you say needs to come out with conviction and clarity. And main thing here is transparency. Third, strategize and pivot things have drastically changed what used to work even days or weeks before might not work anymore. So you need new ideas, you need new approach and you definitely need a new attitude to face that and finally execute effectively. At the end of the day, people of your team needs to feel that they've both accomplished and appreciated and that there is a clear goal for them to absolutely nail the results. So let's dive in uh go through each of these steps individually and talk through.

What can you do as a leader? First of all, check your pulse, self care is important. You need to assess how you're feeling what your reactions to the change are. And mainly are you bought into the change? Are you aligned? You need to take a stance, you cannot bring your team forward if you are not aligned on the changes. So I would say gather as much context as you can talk to your manager or talk to your skip, talk to your peers in the company. All of those networks that you built within your company or your organization, you'll be surprised to find out the different kind of context that all of them have and just chatting with them, you can actually gain a lot more just other than from what you get from the top down narrative.

Next one, I would say lean in on your personal and professional network. Um I personally have a group of like engineering managers that senior managers that I go to, who are, who are my friends, but they are also part of like different companies, not just my own. The reason for leaning on them is they provide different perspectives, those different perspectives, helps to figure out what to do next, but they also helps me to validate. Does it resonate with what I'm hearing internally? Is there a descendant? Uh Is this how companies go through?

Just understanding what people have gone through before figuring out? Does that align with what I'm looking at my company? I think that is definitely helpful. Apart from that, you need a place to rent, you need a place to rent, you need to let it out too. And it's always better to do that with somebody outside the organization rather than with somebody inside the organization. So once you have kind of gone through the process of gathering the context, the next thing is taking a stance, you need to be aligned to march forward.

There might be cases. Uh I'm sure when you don't feel aligned towards the overall decision, um I have an example. Uh I'm a remote employee for me, it doesn't feel right to enforce a three day return to office policy with my team. That that would be ridiculous. Like I can't, I'm not gonna be in the office and then how can I enforce somebody to come into the office in those situations? What I do is I lean in on my manager or the hr to help convey the message across. Um I can lean in on them to set the tone. I can lean in on them to navigate these special situations. Once you are aligned, once you've taken a stance of like, yes, this change makes sense or what is happening across the company, I understand the meaning behind it. Then the next thing that I have historically made a mistake on is not sharing that enough context with people on the team. Generally, I do that with a good internet because I'm trying to find balance between how much context to share with people versus how much do they want to protect and shield them from the trash as a leader.

I'm always watching out for them and I don't want them to go through noise. But then what I realized is if I don't share a lot of context, if I'm not transparent with my team, with the half baked information that they get, they, there is anxiety built up. People reach out on like different forums like blind read their own things and they end up making a judgment which is very different from the narrative. Sometimes innocent things comes out as like, oh, this is politics or things where there's a clear reason behind why your organization made a decision. It leads to gossip. So personally, for me, I've leaned in on sharing as much context as I can with as much transparency as I can with my team knowing, understanding that they have a similar or a higher level of maturity or EQ compared to me. So if I can be trusted with the context more often than not, they can be as well. I didn't want to echo this uh K which is lead from the heart, not from the heart. This is because as a leader, you have a multiplayer effect on your team. If you are hurt, your team will be hurt and that will actually affect the overall execution. Second, communicate, communicate, openly, communicate transparently. Most of this should be fairly obvious to folks. But there are a couple of things that I wanted to highlight here whenever there is a change.

Uh what I used to do is I set up an immediate team meeting uh to get people together to give them context. Uh Also having using that forum as an opportunity to shape the narrative of the situation in those meetings. Earlier, I used to feel pressured to answer every single question or every single comment that came up in the meeting. Um I used to think incorrectly, of course, that that's a forum for cascading the message or to reinforce the message. But then I realized the purpose of the meeting is not that it is to provide a safe space within a smaller group of people where there is psychological safety where people can share their reactions be open with their emotions. It's a place to vent, share their perspectives. It's ok if things get heated, if it's ok. If it gets emotional, there have been times where I have become emotional, I teared up. That's ok because at the end of the day, your team, your organization have gone through a change or a chaos. It's ok to be human and to react in unpleasant, unexpected ways whichever that suits for you. But, but the main key part is once the emotions is out of the way, always, always in the meeting with a clear focus on what can be controlled next. You need not try to strive to reach for a consensus based decision here. All you're aiming for is an agreement on the path forward and a willingness to engage in the next days or months or weeks to follow.

It's natural that any time when your team or organization goes through a chaotic period, it has an impact on the culture. But instead of trying to shape it, I'd say let the chaos shape the culture. People are going to think differently, new processes are going to emerge uh that is expected. So let the chaos shape the culture rather than trying uh rather than you trying to shape it during the time of chaos. Third one, strategize and pivot anytime, anytime when there's a chaos, it needs some kind of a replan. It could be changes to your product, it could be changes to your process. It could be changes to people. It doesn't matter. At the end of the day, there's a replan which is needed and you need to refocus as a leader, you should have clarity and justification behind every investment that your team is working on. Be it short term or long term. One thing uh I see people making mistakes here is as much as you want people to align and march forward in the new direction most immediately. The truth is it takes a while for people to align and account for that buffer, account for people's time to come up with. The new idea. Do some research, probably their engineers do some spikes. Uh figure out what needs to be done next.

There is going to be a buffer time or amount of period where there's going to be ambiguity and that's OK. Just account for the time when you're planning for the next steps. Um You need to be fully brought into the new plan before you can expect them to execute, which makes sense. Um The key thing here is do not just rely on top down narrative and top down directions. Um engage with the team for coming up with new modes of operation, brainstorm with them, include them in discussions, get their suggestions, um prioritize their suggestions and create a plan when you're creating a plan. Also explain to them why you selected some parts of the suggestions and not uh the other mistake um that I've seen people do. I've made this in my past too is to make implicit assumptions. Um You see you are going through chaos, you kind of assume that oh yeah, either folks are brought to the new plan or your leadership or your stakeholder team or your product team. People understand that there's gonna be delays. Um You kind of assume that yeah, people are not gonna be 100% effective. Let's say maybe you lost an engineer. So it's obvious that project is gonna slip or you lost the product manager. Obviously, there's not going to be enough clarity on the product.

You assume a lot of those things. But unfortunately, all those assumptions, if you have not explicitly built agreements with people or reset expectations with them, people are gonna assume that everything is normal. So key thing here is avoiding implicit assumptions and explicitly building agreements with stakeholders and folks and also maybe even writing it down explicitly writing down the reset new expectations on what's gonna happen to the things that you're driving. I'd say be flexible, be adaptable, be open to new ideas. Um It's not gonna be easy, it's not gonna be easy to, let's say shut down a project that people have been working on. It's not gonna be easy to move people from one team to another, from one project to another. Um Especially in terms of chaos, it's also gonna be harder as leaders to give feedback to folks because there's always a fear that they might interpret it differently or you're gonna add more anxiety or stress for them. It's, it's natural to want to stay in your comfort zone or when situations become uncomfortable. But please don't. Um I think that is just uh a trap that people fall into. Just be flexible, be adaptable, be explicit uh and be open to new ideas.

And when you're making decisions, trust your instincts, um be decisive, you are not gonna have a lot of time after a big change has happened in your company to figure out everything at the same time. So you might not have 100% clarity yourself before you were asked to come up with, let's say, estimations or something for your project. Um At those times, what I do is follow Jeff bezos', 70% rule that is making a decision with 70% information and the rest 30% rely on your instinct, your judgment and your experience. Um And that I would do, I would call out that there is a possibility that I could be wrong or you could be wrong in that judgment. Um So one tip I have for folks there is when you are sharing a decision or a judgment, share it with the confidence percentage. So for example, let's say somebody is asking me for a long range planning or estimate for my team right after the layoff or right after they have changed the product direction. I basically go to them and say, hey, I'm 50% or 60% confident we will ship this project.

Here are the XYZ reasons for it. And also I'll say if you would like me to build a 90% confidence on this judgment or decision, this is how long it's gonna take. And here are the next steps kind of just laying out your confidence level, laying out what you're going to do next. Uh I'm just checking with your leadership, your stakeholders, people around you in terms of do they want you to have full clarity before you make the next steps? I think that's helpful, goes back to the point of just explicitly building agreements and resetting expectations with people and finally executing effectively. This technically should be straightforward if you have been doing step one, step two and step three. But regardless, you should continue to follow good execution practices, your processes that you have with your team. But there are a couple of things that I wanted to call out here similar to what we talked before. Every time there's a change or a chaos, you need to revisit your timeline. Um Do not assume that things are gonna go the same way before you might have lost folks to layoffs or people might have left you to attrition.

Um New leader came in, they introduced a new process uh or there's a change in strategy which might mean you completely need to go back to the scratch from, go back to the drawing board, starting from scratch. But the real effect is it is gonna affect the timelines that you previously communicated and that's gonna matter. But talking about deadlines, talking about timelines. The key thing is all deadlines and timelines are set up by humans. So everything is negotiable. There are multiple ways to negotiate or derisk a project, you can negotiate with your product for a smaller scope, you can negotiate with your manager for adding more people to project your team. You can negotiate um with your customers, ask for additional time or extend timelines.

Or if none of that is possible, just reset expectations with the people that you're working on. Maybe you might want them to work more hours or extra hours than you initially expected to set an expectation of how long or how temporary that is going to be. One thing I noticed is the leadership team always, always appreciates early heads up. When things are gonna go south, it's always better to communicate it earlier than to surprise or shock it at a later time, let's say in a chaotic situation. Um layoff, which is pretty common these days, people are in higher stress. One thing that leaders find it hard is how do I ask for status? How do I ask for progress uh without inducing more stress or negatively signaling performance to people? You completely understand as a leader, the team just went through a tumulus period and now you feel hesitant to ask them for updates uh which is totally fair. The key point is you don't, you as a manager, you are not gonna go ask for um deadlines or estimates or whatever it is. What you want to do is lean on the process, which will help you get the answers to those for example, a 15 minute meeting every day to review through the list of items, assigning owners following up on that the next day for the next 15 minutes.

Just leveraging on that process, you do that until you get to the end goal of what you wanna achieve. That would be more helpful because at that point, it is seen as, hey, this process is gonna help me and my manager figure things out rather than my manager is asking me for what needs to be done. Um The other point here is your relationship with ST stakeholders is key. Um This is something you build early on from your um time at your company, those coffee chats, those one on ones, they all should come in handy when now you go and say, hey, things are changing. People will have that empathy and understanding for what's happening. Finally celebrate the small wins. This adds to the motivation and encouragement for folks who are doing and to celebrate taking time to celebrate even the smallest progress helps for folks. Another quote that I truly resonate with wartime CEO violates protocol in order to win.

Um It's, it's tempting to follow all the processes that you used to do before. Um But it's, it's, it's a different time, it needs you to do things differently. Um So there might be trade offs that you can make. So for example, in my past, I've said, oh, let's not do the intern test right now. Let's just get it to beta testing. But apparently they do the intern test, which obviously is gonna break the definition of done rules for my team. But that is what is needed when I've already lost an engineer or so, but that's just an example, be judicious in terms of what rules you're breaking, how that will impact you and the team, but do not hold back if that's the right move to deliver results. So finally, um here's the four steps, definitely check your pulse. Um You want to be aligned before you get your team aligned, communicate openly and transparently strategize and pivot and finally execute effectively. Hopefully, this was helpful. Um I just want to leave you with this code in the midst of every crisis lies great opportunity. I hope all of you find that for your team and for yourself all the best. Um If you have any questions, leave it in the chat, if you have any comments, do share it. Um Happy to connect with folks offline as well, if not have a great evening night and take care. Thank you.