When the growth stops.

Hiring stops. Within a few days you find out what your organization was actually made of, because the thing that was holding most of it together has just been withdrawn.

I have been at both ends of that curve. At Grammarly I was hiring manager for a design team of several dozen. Recruiting was most of my job in that period, whatever my title said. I started at Pitch in January 2022 as VP Product, in the year the numbers stopped going one way.

Second one taught me much more than the first.

## What a freeze actually removes

Apart from the obvious thing, which is headcount, what a freeze removes is your default answer.

While you are growing, "we'll hire for that" settles almost every argument. A discipline with a gap in it. A leader stretched across too many surfaces. An area nobody owns. A cross-functional relationship that keeps failing. All of it gets deferred into an open role. That open role becomes the plan. And because open roles keep getting approved, you never have to find out whether the plan was any good.

Then they stop, and you find out how much of what you were calling organizational design was a hiring plan in a better suit.

Here is the test, bluntly. Try describing your team without mentioning a single job you have not filled yet. If you cannot, you do not have a team structure. You have a wishlist with reporting lines drawn on it.

## The seam work goes first

Design operations, research, design systems, program management, the accessibility work. Call it seam work: the functions that hold the other functions together and own no screen of their own. They all get funded on the same argument, which is scale, because the cost of coordinating people grows faster than the number of people. So the moment the team stops growing, the whole case for them appears to vanish. We are not scaling, so we can stand down the scaling functions.

I think that reasoning is wrong. Wrong in a way that takes about three quarters to become visible, which is exactly long enough for whoever made the call to have moved on.

But seam work was never a tax on growth. It is what stops a team that isn't growing from re-deciding the same twenty questions every quarter. At Grammarly we pushed accessibility into the design system at component level rather than running it as a review checklist. We did it for durability. A standard encoded in a component survives the person who cared about it. A standard living in someone's head leaves when they do. A freeze is exactly the moment that distinction starts to matter, because a frozen team is a team that is slowly losing people it cannot replace.

Growth hides an enormous amount of bad organizational design. A freeze is where the hiding stops.

## Scope is the only currency you have left

When the freeze landed, I spent the week redrawing the product organization rather than waiting for guidance. The whole exercise came down to moving scope. Scope was the only thing left to move. Which in practice means rearranging who owns what, and who is allowed to decide it, without a single new hire to soften any of it.

Two rules came out of that week and I have kept both.

**Retitle to describe what someone is already doing, not what you hope they will do.** First is a correction, and lands as recognition. Second is a bet you're asking the person to fund out of their own credibility.

**Scope only counts if it comes with a decision.** More to look after without more you can decide is just more work, and everyone can tell the difference by about week three. If the new remit does not change what the person is allowed to decide alone, you have not promoted anyone. You have redistributed load and attached a nicer noun to it.

And be honest with yourself about what this is. Scope moved in a freeze is a promotion that costs the company nothing, and everybody recognizes the trick. It is defensible. It is also a debt, and in six months somebody who has been counting will ask about it.

## What you owe the people who stay

Be specific about what has changed. "There is no realistic promotion path for the next eighteen months" is a survivable sentence. People can plan around it, and a surprising number will stay anyway. "We are still figuring it out" is not survivable, because it converts a known constraint into an open-ended anxiety, and people resolve open-ended anxiety by taking calls.

Harder obligation is the one nobody wants. In a freeze your strongest people take on more work and less chance of moving up, which is the standard recipe for losing exactly the people you cannot afford to lose. So you have to say, out loud, to someone very good: there is nothing here for you for a while, and if you find something better I will write the reference. Some of them stay after that conversation. All of them trust you more afterwards.

## Does the work get better or worse

Better, for about two quarters. A settled team carrying no onboarding load is the most productive arrangement in software, and the first months after a freeze can be the best work a group ever does. Then it turns.

What decays is ambition. Teams calibrate what they propose against what they believe can be resourced, and they do it without noticing. Within a year, every proposal coming up to you is correctly sized for a team that is not allowed to grow. Nobody decided this. Nobody can point to the meeting. A ceiling simply becomes the horizon.

The fix is unglamorous, and it works. Keep one piece of work in flight that is clearly too large for the team you have. Not as a stretch goal with a date attached, which is a way of setting people up to fail. As a standing argument about what the company should be, worked on badly and slowly by whoever has room that month. It is not there to ship. It keeps the team's sense of scale from shrinking to fit the budget. So when hiring reopens you still have people who can think at the size of the opportunity.

Plenty of teams do come out better than they went in, because the growth was itself the problem, and a year of not hiring is the only thing that ever forces a company to find out which of its roles were load-bearing. I believe that and would still rather find out some other way.

Most of them will not remember the freeze as the hard part. They will remember the year afterwards, when nothing was wrong and nothing was moving.

I've led design and product organizations at Honor, Lyft, Grammarly and Pitch, through both a hiring spree and a freeze.