Keeping teams steady while the organization changes

Some of the most consequential engineering work does not produce a new feature. It keeps a team able to do good work while the organization around it changes.

My scope has changed more than once across my career, including at Samsara. Responsibilities expand, teams move, and relationships need to be rebuilt. The product still needs attention while people are working out what the new arrangement means.

I think keeping teams productive and morale intact through those transitions deserves serious weight in how we evaluate leaders.

Make the uncertainty specific

People can usually work with a difficult constraint if they understand it. Ambiguity is harder when it affects who decides, which work matters, or how someone can succeed in a role.

During a transition, I want to clarify what has changed and what has not. Which commitments remain? Who owns a decision now? What is still unresolved? When should someone expect an answer?

I cannot remove every uncertainty. I can avoid disguising it as confidence, and I can keep unresolved questions from becoming everyone’s private guessing exercise.

That requires repeated communication. A decision explained once in a meeting is not necessarily a shared understanding across the people doing the work.

Preserve useful working relationships

An organization chart describes formal responsibility. It does not capture all the relationships that make a product work: the engineer who understands a device behavior, the reviewer who knows a difficult history, or the manager who helps two disciplines make a decision together.

I want those connections to survive the transition where they remain useful. New boundaries should make ownership clearer without making collaboration unnecessarily difficult.

This is particularly important in systems that cross hardware and software. Moving a responsibility on paper does not instantly transfer the context needed to exercise it well.

The work includes handoffs, shared priorities, and enough overlap for people to develop judgment in the new arrangement.

Do not let the transition consume every priority

Teams need visible progress on the product as well as clarity about the organization. If everything becomes an internal coordination exercise, people can lose the connection between their work and the reason they joined.

I try to keep a manageable set of concrete outcomes in view. That gives the team something to complete together while the longer-term structure settles.

It also creates useful feedback. If the new arrangement makes an important decision harder, I want to notice and adjust it. Organizational design should be judged partly by what it enables the team to do.

People are not interchangeable capacity

I write a lot about directing AI agents. There are useful parallels around clarity and ownership, but the analogy has limits.

People bring relationships, ambitions, concerns, and developing expertise. A good organizational change has to account for those things. Improving delivery at the expense of trust or growth can damage the system I am trying to improve.

I want managers to have room to lead, engineers to understand how their work matters, and people to see a credible path for themselves as the scope changes.

That responsibility remains human. Tools can increase execution capacity. Keeping an organization able and willing to use that capacity well is leadership work.