Let's Be Honest: When Work Goes Sideways

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Or: What to do when your beautiful frameworks meet actual chaos and your perfectly prioritised roadmap hits the road

You know that moment in every disaster movie where the protagonist realises their carefully laid plans are about to meet a very inconvenient reality?

Maybe it’s a re-org that needs to happen in three weeks instead of three months. Perhaps it’s sudden growth that makes your beautiful culture roadmap look laughably naive. Could be that your star performer just rage-quit in the middle of your biggest product launch, taking half the engineering team’s morale with them.

Suddenly, all that lovely product thinking feels about as useful as a chocolate teapot.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Crisis Mode

When you’re reading our inspirational blog posts about treating employees like users and building minimum loveable products, you haven’t heard us share an honest reality: sometimes your users are having a proper meltdown, your product is actively on fire, and you need to stop thinking like a thoughtful product manager and start thinking like an emergency room doctor.

When crisis hits, your perfectly structured People squad doesn’t have time for user research. Your two-week sprints become two-hour fire drills. That beautiful problem statement you crafted? Mate, the problem is standing in your office crying, or shouting, or both.

This is when many People teams either:

1. Completely abandon their frameworks and revert to reactive chaos, or

2. Stubbornly stick to their process while Rome burns around them

Neither approach ends well. Trust me, I’ve tried both.

The Crisis Triage Framework (Or: How to Not Completely Lose Your Mind)

When everything goes sideways, you need a different kind of framework. Not a planning framework, but a triage framework. Think less “thoughtful product roadmap” and more “battlefield medic.”

The STOP-DROP-ROLL Approach

Remember that fire safety thing from primary school? Turns out it’s surprisingly applicable to People Ops disasters.

1. STOP: Resist the urge to immediately dive into solution mode. Take sixty minutes (yes, even in a crisis) to understand what’s actually on fire versus what just smells like smoke. Ever heard of Kidlin’s Law? If you write down a problem clearly and articulately, you’ve already solved half of it.

2. DROP: Drop your normal frameworks temporarily. Not permanently—we’ll come back to them—but right now you need to work in crisis mode, not product development mode.

3. ROLL: Roll with the chaos while maintaining your core principles. You’re not abandoning everything you’ve built; you’re adapting it to survive the current shitstorm.

Crisis Mode People Operations

In crisis mode, your job shifts from “thoughtful product builder” to “organizational life support system.” Here’s what that actually looks like:

Immediate Triage (First 48 Hours)

1. Who needs urgent care? (The people directly affected by whatever’s exploded)

2. What systems are at risk of failing? (Payroll, compliance, safety—the stuff that can’t wait)

3. What communication needs to happen right now to prevent panic spreading?

Stabilisation

1. Get the bleeding to stop (address immediate legal/compliance/safety issues)

2. Implement temporary solutions that buy you breathing room

3. Communicate frequently, even when you don’t have all the answers yet

Recovery Planning

1. Figure out what your “new normal” looks like

2. Decide which of your frameworks and ways of working still make sense

3. Start planning your way back to proactive rather than reactive

When Your Squad Structure Falls Apart

You’ve got your lovely Employee Experience Squad working on a brilliant new performance feedback system. They’re in week three of their sprint, they’ve done user interviews, they’ve built prototypes, everyone’s feeling very pleased with themselves.

Then your biggest client pulls out, the company needs to cut 30% of staff in six weeks, and suddenly your performance feedback system seems about as relevant as deck chair arrangements on a sinking ship.

This is when your squad structure either proves its worth or crumbles like a biscuit in cup of tea (Yorkie, please).

What Can Happen Now (The Bad Version)

The squad keeps working on their project because “we need to stay focused”. Leadership gets frustrated because HR seems disconnected from reality. People start going around the squad to get urgent things done. Chaos ensues, relationships get damaged, everyone loses trust in the new approach.

What Should Happen Now (The Less Bad Version)

Acknowledge that the squad’s current work is now irrelevant. Rapidly pivot the squad to support the actual crisis. Use your squad skills (research, analysis, coordination) on the urgent problem. Keep your frameworks in your back pocket for when things stabilise.

The Art of Emergency People Product Management

Crisis People Ops still follows some product principles, just with a very different timeline and success criteria.

User Research in Crisis Mode: Instead of long-form user interviews, you’re doing rapid pulse checks. “How are you coping?” becomes more important than “What features would improve your experience?”

Minimum Viable Solutions: Your MVP becomes whatever stops the immediate bleeding. Maybe it’s a simple communication plan, a basic support structure, or just making sure people know they’re not forgotten.

Iterative Improvement: You’re still iterating, just much faster and with higher stakes. What worked today might not work tomorrow, and that’s okay.

Rebuilding After the Storm

Eventually (and I promise this bit comes eventually) the immediate crisis passes. The fire gets put out, the redundancies get completed, the harassment investigation concludes, the regulatory audit finishes.

This is when you face a choice: do you go back to your pre-crisis ways, or do you use what you’ve learned to build something better?

The temptation may be to pretend the crisis never happened and resume your original roadmap as if nothing changed, but a better approach is to take stock of what worked, what didn’t, and what you learned about your organisation under stress.

Use this as a chance to find new problem statements, learn from the lows.

Maybe you discovered that your communication systems aren’t as robust as you thought. Perhaps you learned that certain managers are brilliant in a crisis while others completely fall apart. You might have found that some of your carefully crafted processes actually made things worse when speed mattered more than perfection. Crucially: Use this intel to build better products.

Building Anti-Fragile People Operations

The goal isn’t to create systems that merely survive crisis, it’s to create systems that get stronger from them. This is where your product thinking really shines.

Design for failure: Just like good software systems, good People Operations should assume things will go wrong and build in safeguards.

Build Redundancy where it makes sense: If your Employee Experience Squad lead gets hit by the proverbial bus (or quits in the middle of your busiest quarter), can someone else step in?

Create circuit breakers: What are your tripwires that tell you to stop everything and switch to crisis mode? Define them in advance if you can, so that you can avoid more chaos in the middle of a bigger chaos. Product teams do disaster recovery testing, or at least walking through scenarios. People teams should too. What happens if you lose your biggest client? If there’s a major workplace incident?

The Honest Truth About Sustainable People Operations

Here’s the bit that’s harder to write about than “look at my lovely framework”: sustainable People Operations isn’t about having perfect processes that never break. It’s about building systems that can bend without snapping, and teams that can adapt without losing their sense of momentum and motivation.

Sometimes that means your beautifully prioritised roadmap gets thrown out the window. Sometimes your squad structure becomes “everyone do whatever needs doing right now.” Sometimes your data-driven decision making becomes “we need to decide in the next hour based on incomplete information.”

And that’s okay. It’s really okay.

The mark of a mature People Ops team isn’t that they never face crises—it’s that they can navigate them without completely losing their humanity or their strategic thinking.

Your frameworks are tools, not religions. Your processes are means to an end, not ends in themselves. Your squad structure is a way of organising work, not a sacred covenant.

When a crisis hits, use what serves you, adapt what doesn’t, and don’t be afraid to temporarily set aside the things that aren’t helping.

Your employees don’t need you to be perfect product managers during a crisis. They need you to be competent, caring humans who can think clearly under pressure and help them navigate uncertainty.

The frameworks will still be there when the dust settles. Your people need you to be there for them while it’s swirling.