When the leader of an eighty-engineer program left, I was asked to hold the wheel for a while. Eight weeks later, they quietly stopped looking.
In 2019 I left the startup world for Google. I had spent years building products and teams from zero, and I wanted to learn what building looked like at the scale of billions. I joined Search as an individual contributor, by choice. I wanted my hands on the work.
Six months in, the leader running our program left.
The program was not small. More than eighty engineers. Ten workstreams. Six product areas across three surfaces. A design team full of people with years more context than I had. There was no roadmap. There was barely any documentation explaining how the pieces fit together.
Leadership asked me to keep it afloat while they searched for a permanent replacement.
I have thought a lot about that phrase since. Keep it afloat. It is the assignment you give someone when the bar is survival. I had no formal authority over anyone in the room. What I had was a diagnosis.
The program did not have a leadership problem. It had a clarity problem. Nobody could say what the most important work was, so everything was important, which meant nothing was.
So I did what I had always done at startups, just with more zeros attached. We built the program's first real roadmap. We cut more than half the work on it, because most of it was activity, not progress. I fought for design to have a seat in annual planning instead of receiving the output of it. We made the work visible, set a cadence, and let people see what was actually happening for the first time.
Eight weeks later, leadership stopped looking for a replacement.
What followed was the pattern that has defined my career. Scope kept arriving before authority did. I went from stabilizing one program to driving search innovation projects, leading teams through influence first and managing them later, because the trust always showed up before the org chart caught up. By the time I left for Disney, I was running search innovation teams and had just taken on the Google app on Android.
None of that was given to me because of a role. Organizations do not hand you their most ambiguous, high-stakes problems because of what your title says. They hand them to you because of what happened the last time they did.
The startup years taught me to build products and teams from nothing. Google taught me that the same building works inside one of the most complex organizations on earth, with or without the formal authority, because the underlying problem is almost always the same.
Most struggling efforts are not failing because people are incapable.
They are failing because nobody has made it clear what matters.
Clarity is the job. Everything else is the org chart.