The mandate inverts.

I joined Pitch to run product, design and research as one organization, and to grow it. Our plan survived exactly one board meeting, and the reason had nothing to do with the plan or the people who approved it.

This was 2022. Between my signing and that meeting, the SaaS correction arrived. Valuations that had priced permanent growth stopped doing that, and a company built to hire spent the following year doing the opposite. I have written elsewhere about managing through events nobody trained you for. This one is smaller and more common than a crisis: the job you were hired to do stops existing, and you are still there.

## It arrives as a spreadsheet

It arrives as a spreadsheet and a sentence, and the sentence is reasonable. Market's moved. Your plan is priced in a currency that no longer exists. Here is the new envelope.

You can argue with the numbers, and you should, once, properly, with your own. What you cannot do is confuse the plan you were hired on with the job. I had written a whole argument about functions being subordinate to the business before I had to practice it at that scale. I can report that the principle is much easier to hold in prose.

First decision is whether you are staying. It comes before any question of what to do. A leader who privately thinks the new envelope is wrong, stays anyway, and executes it at half conviction does more damage over a year than a clean departure does in a week. I have watched that happen to other people and it is a slow, expensive way to lose a team's trust. If you are staying, you are staying on the new terms, and everyone should be able to tell.

A team that has watched you handle its hardest week has finished calibrating exactly how far to trust you, in either direction.

## Ambiguity does the damage

Whatever the constraint turns out to be, what costs you most is how long people spend not knowing it.

A year of quarterly revisions, each one small, is worse than one hard conversation in March. Everyone spends the months in between privately modeling what might be coming, instead of doing the work. People can take a firm answer they dislike. A provisional one they can only brace against, and a braced team does nothing well.

So in a constrained year the useful skill is saying a settled thing early. Including the unwelcome ones. This budget is what we have for four quarters. There is no new headcount. This project is not coming back. Every one of those sentences is easier to say once than to imply for six months.

## What a constrained year is good for

I want to be careful here, because there is a genre of writing that treats hard years as secretly good for you, and that is mostly a story people tell afterwards.

What is true is narrower. A constraint removes what a plentiful year protects. Parallel bets nobody believed in. A meeting that continues because canceling it would be read as a signal. An initiative that exists because someone senior once asked about it. A real budget conversation kills all of it, and none of it was doing anything.

You can see the whole thing again, too. When less is happening, everyone can hold the whole shape of it in their head, and that is when people make good decisions without being told. Most of what gets called alignment is just that. A small enough thing that a reasonable person can hold all of it.

## The part you cannot perform

There is no performance of leadership that survives a year like this. Whatever you actually are is what the room sees.

If the 1:1s were real before, they get more real, because they are suddenly the only place anyone can ask the question they are actually carrying. If they were theater, everyone finds out at once. Same goes for the written record. A leader who has been writing down decisions and reasoning all along has something to point at when the reasoning changes. A leader who has not is asking to be taken on faith at the exact moment faith is expensive.

None of that is something you can install in a difficult quarter. It is either already there or it is not. That's the uncomfortable part, and also the only actionable thing here. Work that carries a hard year is all done in the easy one.

## What I would do differently

I would decide faster. I spent longer than I should have looking for a version of the plan that preserved everything. That search was itself a cost. It kept the team in a provisional state while I did it. There usually is no such version, and looking for it is a way of postponing the moment you have to say something firm.

And I would separate my own disappointment from the message. I had joined to build something and was not going to get to, and that is a real thing to feel. Carrying it is my job rather than the team's, and a leader who lets it leak turns a business constraint into a mood that everyone then has to work around.

A mandate inverting was the event nobody trained me for. Training for it turned out to be everything else. The 1:1s, the written record, the habit of saying the true thing early, back when it was cheap. None of it was designed for a hard year. All of it is what a hard year runs on.

I ran a combined product, design and research organization at Pitch through the 2022 SaaS correction. Written from this chair a constrained year is a leadership exercise. For the people whose work or roles change underneath it, it is not. Nothing in the paragraph above is much comfort if the plan that stopped existing was yours. I have been on that side of it too, and the honest thing to say is that the two experiences are not comparable and I would not pretend otherwise.