You'll Get Re-Orged Again This Year. Here's How to Be Ready.
You can't stop the re-org, but you can use the weeks that follow it to advance your career.
It was my first experience of a big re-org, and we did everything wrong.
The announcement landed in a meeting that lasted fifteen minutes. We got a new VP, a new organizational structure, and half the teams moving under managers I’d never worked with.
When our team met right after the announcement, our manager was peppered with questions.
“What does this mean for my project?” “Am I still on this team?” “Who do I report to now?”
To each question, he gave the same answer, in slightly different words.
“I don’t know.”
We didn’t believe him.
We asked him again the next day, and the day after that. We traded theories in DMs about what was coming, and why.
We burned weeks of nervous energy trying to pull certainty out of a person who had none to give. Because the decision had been made three levels above him, and he’d found out about it only a day before we did.
I went through more than twenty managers in my eighteen years at Amazon. The last five were under one person,…
