Throwing Away Your Legos
If you’re reading this blog, you’re probably the sort of person who has heard the advice to Give Away Your Legos. It’s the notion that as your company scales, your job responsibilities will change very rapidly and necessitate letting new hires take over teams/projects/problems/functions that used to be your job, freeing you to go after the Next Big Thing™. The metaphor of “giving up your Legos” captures the notion that this will be an emotional process…just like letting someone play with your Legos as a kid. Will they break it? Will they build on to my super cool tower the way I want them to? Will they ever give them back? It’s hard to give up a team or function to which you dedicated yourself or maybe even built up from scratch!
Crazy startup rocket ship isn’t the only place where Legos must be given away. Anyone who has ascended the corporate ranks has encountered the need to let go of past responsibilities as a necessary prerequisite to doing the next-level-up job. You can’t focus on strategy and direction for a whole org if you’re still busy managing day-to-day execution.
What no one really talks about is how this comes up even when your company is shrinking. Hiring freezes, layoffs, chronic headcount crunches, forced stack ranks, and priority lists where most of it ends up on the cutting room floor. This is the new reality of tech and even the largest, most successful companies aren’t immune. In even these situations you will be faced with give-away-your-legos moments…but with a catch: there won’t be anyone to pick up your old responsibilities. Screw giving them away, you are straight up throwing your Legos in the garbage and it feels so much harder than just transitioning that work to someone else.
I really struggled with this recently. For years I was the overall technical lead of Drive’s serving infrastructure…everything ranging from the backends and networks that transfer/sync/deliver your data, streaming and transcoding, file viewing, to the APIs that power both 1st and 3rd party applications and the ecosystem of partnerships around that. Then the GenAI revolution happened. Over night we went from peacetime to wartime: all headcount was directed at AI investments, projects were cancelled, and teams were reorganized to ensure we could quickly secure Workspace’s role in the future of productivity. As a key technical lead and respected executor, I too was asked to drop what I was doing and dive in––specifically to help improve our search capabilities as both a critical user journey and a technical building block of RAG. The expectation was that I would completely drop my old responsibilities and focus full-time on the new problem. But here’s the catch: there was no one to take over in my stead. We wouldn’t hire a backfill, the local EMs were stretched to capacity, and no one waiting on the bench was even remotely close to being able to handle the role.
Without a clear successor, I was being asked to take my precious baby (platform and ecosystem) and drop it on the floor without a second thought. Those projects and teams would continue just without the support, guidance, and clarity of an uber technical lead. Good luck everyone! “Not on my watch,” I thought. All I needed to do was keep an eye on both things simultaneously. Jump in if any fires start, coach the EMs and TLs, review designs, all while pushing the envelope on search/AI…sure there might be a couple long nights but juggling a bazillion things is my professional brand. This should be doable…right!?
The result was very predictable. I spent 90% of my time tending to my old job and making sure everything was still going well while the search/AI work dragged on. The rest of the search tiger team moved on without me and I stopped getting invited to the meetings (not maliciously, mind you, people just literally forgot I was suppossed to be working on this thing). My boss’s feedback was equally predictable as she looked over my accomplishments week-over-week: “this is all valuable stuff so you can keep doing it….but it isn’t what’s most important to the business and I can’t really reward you for doing it.” Even then, I still couldn’t find the emotional energy or willingness to let go of my old demesne.
Why was this so hard for me? There was no one to take over. Letting go is one thing, but taking something you built and nurtured for years and leaving it in the woods to fend for itself is something else altogether. But this is exactly what the business was trying to do…intentionally! We had jointly agreed that the GenAI “moment” was an existential threat and that we couldn’t keep operating the status quo. A new product strategy was developed and my old domain was not relevant: this required some hard prioritization decisions where things like “partner ecosystem” fell below the cutline…lots of great Drive<->3P SaaS integrations weren’t going to propel user engagement and retention when entirely new ways of working were being pioneered by our competitors.
In a sense, there were two hypotheses we were testing simultaneously:
If we focus all our energy into AI transformation, does the market respond? Can we compete and offer something users find useful?
Can we put ecosystem/platform/APIs into maintenance mode without affecting our SUPER1 metrics? Do we really need a dedicated senior staff technical lead to keep the train on the tracks or can this area be run more efficiently?
By failing to throw away my Legos, I prevented the business from confirming or refuting either hypothesis. I won’t go so far as to say we “made no progress,” but we certainly did not gather any new information about whether our AI strategy pivot would work.
Successful Careers Thrive on Discomfort
Failing to give/throw away your legos leads directly to stasis. As in my story above, I was out of alignment with the business and not directly working on our top priorities. Go figure, that meant the center of attention (and with it the resources and growth opportunities) went elsewhere.
It may sound odd to talk about growth when we’re specifically analyzing a company that is in contraction, but any well-run org goes through periodic cleanup cycles. Cycles where unnecessary or overgrown functions are reaped, processes are tweaked with efficiency in mind, and anything deemed no longer serving the strategic focus of the system is expunged…all so that organizational energy is being directed disproportionately towards those activities which generate progress (i.e. market success). Rocket ship or not, you will encounter this eventually.
Failing to come along for the ride risks becoming obsolete or even outright vestigial (layoffs ahoy). Whatever good will and influence you built while Being Awesome at The Old Thing will go to zero. You’ll find your peers who did answer the call rising in the power rankings and next time a major opportunity rolls around you won’t even be asked/considered. After all, you’ve shown you can’t give up what you already have anyways. Diamond hands is not the right strategy here.
This means embracing discomfort….
The discomfort of doing something new you’re not sure how to do just yet.
The discomfort of having to re-prove yourself over and over.
The discomfort of watching what you built previously struggle along without you.
This stuff is hard, it directly triggers multiple fundamental pathways in our brains that detect social threats. I call these the SCARFI threats (a very slight extension of David Rock’s social threat model):
Status: going from King of the Hill to The New Kid is jarring. What if you fail? What if you never reclaim your crown?
Certainty: the new thing is full of ambiguity, it’s not clear how it will turn out or whether this will be a positive experience.
Autonomy: you used to be trusted to run your area, but now you’re just “part of the team” and your boss has likely taken a special interest in ensuring things go well.
Relatedness: you’re likely being forced to work with new people and with it must handle the social anxiety of learning others’ ticks and tells while trying to build a real relationship.
Fairness: what if the new thing fails for reasons outside of your control? What if someone else with more context or experience in this area wanders in and out shines me? Do I really have a fair shot at succeeding?
Identity: you view your old role as a core part of your identity. “I’m the API guy!” Your sense of self and place in the social fabric is being forcefully rewritten and only time will tell if you like “the new you.”
Your brain will be screaming at you the whole time “turn back! defenses activate!” This is not your better nature speaking and the only way forward is cold rationality.
Chuck and Run: Overcoming SCARFI
What people usually want to hear is that you should carefully hand off everything––ensuring that any people you leave behind have clear instructions and extra support when the inevitable fire springs up. While you might not have a successor, surely softening the landing is the responsible thing to do…right!?
Wrong. This is the exact instinct that gets you into trouble and it’s little more than a post-hoc justification for your bad behavior.
Our instinct is to control everything, including how someone does our old job after we’ve moved on. But the truth is, the business is evolving. What’s really happening here is the company has to re-evaluate what is truly existential and what is nice to have, what actions and investments really move the needle exponentially vs. linearly, etc. This isn’t the sort of thing you can usually figure through arm chair analysis––you throw your best people on your hardest problems and see how much it moves the envelope. Meanwhile you suffocate and starve everything else. For a new operating model to emerge you can’t keep the old one on life support.
One of two things will happen: it will crash and burn badly or… it won’t. That’s tautological but what really matters is the magnitude of badness. There is a degree of acceptable loss in any enterprise: slightly higher costs because no one is optimizing the AWS bill, customers complain the return process is a little clunky but it’s rarely used, a P1 bug takes an extra week to resolve but nothing implodes because of it, etc.
If all goes well, it’s probably because either…
That thing doesn’t matter as much as you think it did (yay, you discovered you were wasting your time and now you’re not, rejoice), or…
Someone who was coasting will step up and surprise you, filling the vacuum, uncovering latent capacity you didn’t know you had (build that bench, baby!)
Either way, you leave with new information about how much that thing matters, whether you have key person risk, and all of it confirmed fact rather than speculation and doubt which are prone to self-confirming biases. More information is always better than less.
Do not carefully place your Legos on the shelf for the next person, coming back every few days to clean off the dust and give them a polish…throw them directly in the trash and GO!
SUPER: System Health, User Sentiment, Productivity, Engagement, and Revenue