One of the more frustrating experiences as an engineering manager is when you're raring to go—team humming, roadmap in motion—but the broader company direction is... blurry. Maybe a reorg just landed, or your leadership is preoccupied with fundraising, or priorities shift every few weeks. Whatever the reason, your team is looking to you for direction, and the top-down goals just aren’t there.
So what do you do?
Step 1: Acknowledge the ambiguity, don’t paper over it
One of the common traps I’ve fallen into is pretending like the ambiguity doesn’t exist. I try to reverse-engineer a strategy from half a slide deck and the CEO’s latest all-hands riff, hoping to convince myself and the team that we’re marching in a straight line.
But the team can smell this. They sense the hand-waving. A more effective approach is to name the ambiguity: “We don’t yet have clear company goals for this half. That’s frustrating—and also normal at times like these.” Just saying that out loud can reduce anxiety more than prematurely declaring certainty ever will.
Step 2: Anchor on durable truths
Even in the absence of specific goals, there are usually some durable truths to work with. These might include:
- Customer needs that don’t change overnight
- Systems and tooling that need investment
- Latency or reliability metrics that matter no matter what the strategy is
- Talent growth that continues regardless of quarterly OKRs
When in doubt, orient your team toward what will definitely still matter six months from now. These aren't sexy bets, but they’re rarely wasted ones.
Step 3: Propose a point of view
One of the more valuable things you can do as a mid- or senior-level leader is propose a strategy in the absence of one. Not with the hubris of saying “this is the plan,” but more like: “Here’s what I think our priorities might be if we consider where the company’s been heading.”
Maybe that’s:
- Improving observability on flows that your team owns
- Shipping a rewrite that you've been putting off because of competing product priorities
- Building internal tooling because hiring is paused but developer time is expensive
You’re not setting company strategy, but you are helping the company stay in motion by creating a starting point for discussion. In my experience, people tend to engage more when there’s something concrete on the table, even if they disagree with half of it.
Step 4: Create alignment locally
Even if top-level goals are unclear, you can create clarity at your level. That means aligning the engineers, product, and design folks in your org around the best information you have, and setting short-term, high-confidence priorities.
A lightweight six-week plan with room to adjust is better than waiting indefinitely for OKRs to drop. Think of this as organizational keepalive: you're sending the signal, “We’re still here. We’re still building.”
Step 5: Feed the system
Lastly, push your learnings up. If you’re making bets, or if your team is stalled because priorities aren’t clear, share that with your leadership chain. Not as a complaint, but as a prompt: “We’re currently doing X because we believe Y is the priority—let us know if we should adjust.”
You’re helping your leaders by showing where gaps exist. Sometimes the silence isn’t intentional—it’s just a symptom of them being underwater.
The uncomfortable truth is that a lack of clear goals isn’t always a bug. Sometimes it’s a feature of a company in flux. The skill, then, isn’t just executing against a perfect plan—it’s helping shape one, especially when no one else is sure what to do.
That's leadership in practice. Not waiting for clarity, but navigating your team through uncertainty.