Navigating The Recession: a Checklist for Engineering Leaders

As an engineering leader, a recession presents an opportunity to refocus and prioritize.

It is the perfect time to hone your skills and prepare your org for the future, making sure you survive and outcompete during tough times, and scale as soon as things improve.

During this period, you can expect changes to your teams. However, with your expertise and leadership, you’ll be able to navigate these challenges with confidence and come out stronger on the other side. Here’s how.

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During a recession, taking care of your people is critical. As an engineering leader, your ultimate goal should be to build high-performing teams to help you weather the storm.

To achieve this, you must develop empathy and focus on keeping your people happy and aligned with the company's purpose. This will create a recipe for success, allowing your teams to keep improving as your company grows. Let's explore how you can enable this. 

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Being a great engineering leader comes from something other than great tools, processes, or even people. It starts with you. 

A recession can be stressful, leaving you feeling lost and without a North Star. But to succeed and make it through this time, you must focus on developing yourself as a leader. 

The bottom line is: you're not alone. Thousands of leaders in all functions are going through it. So, don't panic, and look into some of the items below for support. 

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Dear engineering leader, it's time to sharpen your axe, the technical axe. 

We know you have a ton of tech debt to deal with, which was left unchecked because your teams were too busy and focused on hypergrowth. But that's on pause now - you have the gift of time. Use it to do that migration, invest and pamper your CI and hone in on your security. 

Here's what we suggest doing on the tech side. 

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