Adaptability is a super power

Sticking with how you’ve always done things won’t always work.

Not every company you work for will need and value the same things.

Seems like a no-brainer right? Well here’s what surprised me: Your company and team won’t always value the same things. Things will change.

Learning how to grow, adapt, and thrive in the new structures, values, or processes will help you standout and be considered first for new opportunities.

Sticking with how you’ve always done things won’t always work. It will leave you frustrated, and likely feeling stuck and passed up on for opportunities.

My story: from startup to acquisition to scale-up

Things have changed for me a lot over the last 3-4 yrs – while being on the same team the whole time.

4 yrs back, we were a high-growth startup. We were 3-4xing our revenue every year, and we 3x’d our headcount one year.

The name of the game was innovation, building new products, and moving fast.

We were moving so fast things were being sold into contracts that hadn’t been built yet. Several times I found out a client was onboarding in 3 months, and needed a new product or feature that would’ve normally taken me 6-12 months to build.

Part of our magic was figuring out how to deliver value in the quickest time possible.

One example is an email campaigns tool we built.

Initially our design team had some amazing designs, but after reviewing them, I realized it would take us at least 6 months to build the custom drag-n-drop email editor they had dreamed up.

I realized this might be an instance of over spending on things that are not a unique part of our value proposition, and would really hurt our time to market.

I took a look at all the pre-built plugins and editors out there and found one that checked all the boxes for our goals. However, It was several thousand dollars a month.

When I told my boss, he said: “2-3 grand a month, but I don’t need my dev team working on it for 6 months and maintaining it forever? That’s cheap. Let’s do it.”

What first started as a 6 month project, I was able to deliver in 6 wks because our priorities were time to market, and meeting our customer’s needs quickly.

I learned how to thrive in this startup environment. Move fast, break shit, fix shit was our motto. And for a long time this worked and helped us win! 🚀

Enter the change event

Here’s where things get interesting and where people either rocket-ship their growth or start to feel frustrated and stuck.

Let’s call it: a change event.

Something changes that requires new ways of working or new areas of focus.

For me the change event was a company acquisition. For you it might be teams merging, new team members joining/leaving, acquiring a new massive client, etc.

Whatever that big change is, it can often surprise us with how much changes and we can start to feel like we are losing our touch.

If we go back to my personal example, we were acquired, and for a while things continued on as normal. The company that acquired us was happy to keep us innovating and building amazing products quickly and eat up new market share.

However, after a while the cracks started to show.

Our new parent company was known for reliability, stability, and solid products.

In this new world, our clients aren’t necessarily looking for mega speed and innovation. Move fast and break shit doesn’t fly the same with large enterprise clients. They want to know their system will be up without issues, and they can come into work without worrying about a bug or outage.

But how to you go from move fast and break shit to stable, reliable, scalable while still delivering new value to customers? That’s not a switch you can flip overnight.

A lot of it has required new processes, new thinking, new ways of building, etc. All the while not just disappearing for 2 yrs while rebuilding everything.

At it’s worst this “transition” has felt like hitting the breaks in the middle of the race. It’s jarring, unexpected, and leaves a bunch of grumpy / confused drivers.

At it’s best it’s feel inspiring and like we can finally clean up all the old tools and dust that’s accumulated in the workshop for the last few years.

Why does this matter to me?

Ok Caleb, that’s cool – but how does that apply to me? I’m not being acquired…

Totally hear you, but from what I’ve seen our industry has and is going through massive changes. We are beyond the “hire at all costs and throw money at engineers to retain them” phase of tech.

So many of us have lived through various big “change events” the last couple yrs.

Ai going mainstream, big tech layoffs, new company unicorns, flatter org structures, etc.

In this environment it’s easy to be confused, to wish for the good old days, or just want to throw in the towel and move on.