Surviving in the "chaos management" era

In the 8 months since I started my current job, I've switched through 3 different directors, and my team has worked on 5 unrelated projects. All the decisions make sense, but the pace of change is crazy.

This is by far most chaotic time I've ever experienced in my 15 year career.

There are a few things happening at once:

Anyway, quite a tough time for EMs, but that’s not news for you.

What I feel most people miss is that the succeeding right now as an EM requires much more non-technical skills than ever before:

Let’s look at each one of the causes of this chaos:

If you haven’t received a message in the style of "I built this feature in an hour in Lovable, can we add it to our app tomorrow?", you probably will…

The solution is not to go crazy and try meet the impossible expectations. It’s to find the right ways to connect the non-engineering people to reality. I was told too many times by a senior leader (usually from product): “I still can’t understand, shouldn’t this take just days with Claude? Look at OpenClaw, a single person built it!”.

To handle these conversations you need to know what to say to whom, how to push back, when to wait. Getting your whole org aligned on what is realistic and what not is quite a challenge, it’s one of your most important jobs right now.

By far the easiest way to find a job is through personal connection (if not, then on my side project, leadjobs.dev!). Engineers you managed who liked working with you, peers, previous managers (I found every job I had this way).

Of course you need some hands on experience in today’s market, I’m not saying to be completely behind. Still, if you spend years being a manager people want to work with again, you are much more likely to find a job.

Around 50% of the first-line managers reading this manage 9 to 15 people.

You can of course just ignore your engineers and let them survive by themselves, but then your chances of a happy and productive team are usually much lower. I strongly believe that every human being can benefit from a good manager who’s there for them.

Doing that for a large amount of people requires a lot of mental effort. Knowing who needs you when, who’s frustrated, who is not challenged anymore, what doesn’t work in the team dynamics, etc.

Yeah, AI can help here of course (like I wrote in “the EM memory crisis” article), but that’s just a small part.

There's a good chance you report to a director who is busier than ever and with less attention to give you than ever before. Getting what you need from them, and involving them at the right moment, is not really a “prompting” problem.

You need to:

And all that with minimal 1:1 time.

There are 2 skills I try to master, and one very simple and effective method:

Compression is being able to take your experience/feeling/thought and compressing it into the right few sentences for the other person. Articulate yourself so the other side fully gets you, while in parallel:

Decompression: being able to receive information effectively - get as close as possible to what the other side tried to transmit. Make the other side feel heard, and walk out of conversations feeling that both sides understood each other.

Persuasion is a must skill right now:

In an article last year I went over 5 effective methods:

It’s very hard to judge the improvements in the 2 skills above. The only effective method I found is to insist on high-quality feedback from senior leaders.

As I wrote in the curse of good managers (excuse me for the overload of references, this whole topic is dear to me), when you do your job reasonably well as an EM you often don't get useful feedback. Your engineers don't say anything, and your manager isn't involved enough in the day to day.

So in addition to trying to get the maximum from my own manager, I ask senior leaders directly. Very often their ‘bird-eye’ view can provide valuable feedback.

It can be small: after a recent short demo I gave the company, I asked the director of product for feedback on how my message was received (I was too unfocused, tried to cover too many things - awesome feedback!).

It can also be bigger. I recently asked a senior executive for feedback, and his first response was "you're doing a great job, keep it up." But then I focused him: do you feel I know how to push things the right way and get my agenda through? I felt like I started a bit on the left foot here. And he said, "I wouldn't say left foot, but definitely things you can improve, schedule some time for us when I’m back from US?"

YES. That was the goal (I’ll let you know once the conversation happens - a very recent example!).