Preparing a team for change: Brian Brennan, Director of Product Engineering at Splice

Today I’m talking to Brian Brennan, Director of Product Engineering at Splice. They’ve been with the company for a number of years, in both individual contributor and leadership roles. Through our conversation, I noticed a few resonant themes:

Changes can keep great employees around. While the tech industry overall is in an ebb state at the moment, and the competition for talent less fierce than the heyday of 2015, great employees still want to succeed. And when the company reboots – through a management change, or a re-org, or a pivot – great employees can get unblocked, be more efficient, and engage with the new direction in a deeper way.

Roll out change at expected inflection points. Brian highlights how business goals at Splice drive the formation of smaller, project-based teams. During each quarter or half of the year, those teams may dissolve and coalesce around more pressing priorities. Having a sort of built-in change calendar primes team members to expect shifts, so they aren’t as surprised. 

Show the strategy behind the change. In the AMICUS framework, we say “assess the variables you are trying to move” and “set metrics and a timeline” – you can avoid a ton of shock, confusion, and your team members feeling like the changes are arbitrary or haphazard by showing which business goals the changes serve. 

Brian is a thoughtful leader with a bunch of creative tactics on leading a tech business unit. Directors, managers, and ICs can all find something valuable to enact in his insights. 

What are a few changes you’ve experienced in your past year at work?

Where to start? Well, first we had an entire reorganization. It was ultimately the best for the company, but my title has changed 3 times, the teams I worked with changed, and then my role expanded and changed again a year later.

The reorg was incredibly helpful for me personally, because it helped me be more effective for the organization, and I decided to stick around. 

The changes came from the needs of the business: product and engineering needed to shift our focus, our approach, to be a more effective organization. Previously we’d been split into front-end and back-end teams, and with that sort of split, there’s too much friction. We needed to coordinate more closely in order to do bigger things (and because every project usually has both). 

How do you approach ushering in change with the teams you lead?

We’ve gotten to a place where there will be a lot of change – we’ve set this expectation. This is normal for a company in a growth stage, things won’t be stable or the same for the next two years. 

And the changes are not random, that is another bit to underscore: I’ve heard from engineers that the past changes have felt random, they didn’t see the strategy behind it. Now I’m trying to show them the narrative around why this is happening. 

Engineers can be initially surprised, maybe even shocked, because they are working on their own day-to-day projects. So talking about change in the big picture and at a high level can disrupt their flow. We try to time the change in a way that’s less disruptive to their work. 

How do you set expectations around change?

We try to align with moments of existing change: both at the half-year point, and at the quarter.

At the half-year point, we try to determine what we are working on, what “pods” will exist (pods are cross-functional project-level teams that have some combination of engineering, product, and design). The pods will go through bigger reshuffles at the half, but some smaller shuffles at the quarter. We might spin down a pod, spin up a pod. 

We try to align with those change points to avoid change fatigue. The working theory is that it gives people some sense of working stability. At the half, people can lift their heads up from their day-to-day work, and it feels less disruptive. Anecdotally it has helped, even with our cross-functional partners, if we are aligning changes, that helps with communication too. 

We do try to minimize the number of times folks get new managers in these changes. Reorgs and layoffs have meant that a few folks have had too many managers, and I try to balance how many times folks are shifting managers with the needs of the business. There’s a lot of calculus to figure out, but I do the best I can to maximize upside and minimize downsides for our teams.  I work closely with my managers on their input to make it the least disruptive. 

Has Surviving Change at Work helped your team members? If so, how?

I recommended Surviving Change at Work to one of my skip-level reports, because we were talking about all the change Splice was going through, and I knew, as a Director, that more change was coming. 

The section on stages of the companies was really good — that resonated a lot with folks, how the company changing means they need to change as well. The book gives people a way to latch onto a “bigger picture” understanding of why we’re going through these changes.

For individuals, understanding both what their values are, and what value they have for an organization. Some folks struggle with thinking about their monetary value to the business, but I personally think that’s what the book got right. Especially as someone who is values-driven, it’s even more important to understand your worth to the business so that they aren’t exploited because of their (very important) internal drive towards mission. 

Who would find Surviving Change at Work helpful? 

I can recommend the book for a few different folks: 

1. Career-changers. If you’ve worked at a larger organization, and you’re trying to move to startups.

2. Leaders who have to enact change. It can be a useful tool for how to message change better, particularly if their ICs read it. It creates a shared language for people going through change on-the-ground. 

3. Early-hires in a maturing startup. If you’ve worked at a startup from the beginning, and you feel like something is changing, and don't understand what — maybe you’re less impactful, or policies or managers are changing —it can help them find a space in the organization as it changes. 

Surviving Change at Work is now available as an audiobook on Audible and Spotify.

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