The Roadmap Will Still Be There in 20 Minutes
We were supposed to talk about the feature rollout—load monitoring and rollback strategies.
It was mid-pandemic and one of my engineers had been a bit flat lately—slower on Slack, camera off more than usual. I figured: tired. We were all tired. I had thirty minutes blocked out to check progress and shift some blockers around.
Five minutes in, the roadmap became irrelevant.
They were struggling with anxiety. Work felt impossible. The news was relentless—political chaos layered on top of a world that already felt like it was coming apart at the seams. They started crying and I just sat there like a lemon, completely out of my depth, thinking: what the hell do I do now?
You won’t find the correct response in any job description or 90-day plan.
You get promoted because you’re good at building stuff. You understand systems. Trade-offs. You can debug a gnarly problem at 2am and feel weirdly satisfied about it. Then one day you’re sitting across from another human being who is having a God-awful time, and none of that applies.
My first instinct was to say something clever, inject some dark humour or offer a solution, because that’s what I do. I solve problems.
But there was no technical solution to this.
So I just… listened. I stayed quiet. I didn’t try to make it better or offer some hollow perspective. Let the silence hang there—awkward, heavy, way longer than felt comfortable.
I left that call convinced I’d failed them.
But later on they told me how grateful they were to be able to share what was going on for them. It felt like the load had been lightened.
Bearing witness is a skill. And it’s a weird one, because it looks awfully similar to doing nothing. Every instinct screams at you to fill the dead air, to prove your value, to manage the situation somehow.
But sometimes the most useful thing you can do is just stay put. To be an anchor while someone is washed away by something bigger than they can handle in that moment.
For ages I thought my discomfort meant I wasn’t qualified. What business do I have sitting with someone’s anxiety? But that feeling only stuck around because I thought I needed an answer or some wisdom to impart.
Once I dropped that preoccupation, it got easier. You don’t need a psychology degree. You just have to be willing to stay in the room when things get hard.
From then on I changed how I ran my 1:1s.
I started leaving space at the top—not diving straight into Jira tickets and blockers. Instead I asked: How’s your energy? How’s life outside of this screen? Some folks would shrug it off, but if there were other things on their minds, they knew this was the time to dive in.
I watched my more reserved engineers more carefully after that. They weren’t going to volunteer that they were drowning. But if I asked the right question and then shut up, they’d let me in. Sometimes.
The world hasn’t calmed down since 2020. If anything, the political turmoil is intensifying again. The news cycle is relentless. Your team members are carrying things into work that have nothing to do with the sprint but everything to do with their capacity to contribute to it.
You can ignore this. Stick to the agenda, keep it professional, maintain your boundaries.
Or you can accept that leadership is mostly about humans, and humans are vastly more than their work outputs.
The roadmap will still be there in twenty minutes.