I dug up an email from my first weeks at Reonomy and forwarded it back to the leadership team.
The old note described the basic management system I wanted. Regular one-on-ones that were not status meetings. Written goals. Clear feedback. Time for people to talk about the team, the work, and what they needed from me.
I still believed all of it. I had also let too much of it slide.
The company had grown, the technical work had spread out, and my calendar had filled with product and engineering decisions. I was trying to manage too many people directly while also setting direction across very different kinds of work. The one-on-ones were still happening, but not often enough to do what I wanted them to do.
I wrote that we had missed an early chance to build a stronger communication culture. Groups had become more separate. Ideas did not move across the company as easily as they should. Some decisions took too long because we did not have a steady way to examine them and make the call.
This was not a new concern. A few months earlier I had removed recurring one-on-ones from my calendar because the meeting load had become ridiculous. That gave me time back, but it did not remove the need for real management.
The blunt part of the email was about me. I needed another strong technical manager. I had seen the model work at Shutterstock, and I knew I could not keep doing every direct relationship well while carrying the rest of the job. I wrote that the current setup was putting both me and the business in a bad position.
There was no clever framework at the end. A colleague replied with the simple answer: I was going to need help.
That was correct. The next job was to make room for it and find the person.