I remember logging in the morning after the layoffs.
The team that was left: me on QA, a UI designer, a lead developer, and two frontend developers. Five people where there used to be a lot more.
The job in front of us was simple enough. Finish the bug fixes. Ship version 1. And Keep moving.
Nobody really talked about what had just happened. But everyone was thinking the same thing.
"Am I next?"
The energy in those first standups was different. Quieter. People were showing up but you could feel the weight behind it. Management eventually addressed it directly. If the product doesn't shut down entirely, everyone who's still here stays. Not a glamorous thing to say, but it was honest. And it helped.
Took a couple of weeks before things started feeling like work again instead of aftermath.
What I didn't expect was how it felt to lose the PM who had originally brought me in. The one who gave me the lead QA role in the first place.
That hit differently. Not just because of the extra workload. But because watching someone who believed in you get let go reminds you fast that this industry doesn't run on loyalty. It runs on circumstances.
I felt demotivated. A little afraid. Not for long, but it was there.
The first few weeks of actually running things were just a lot at once. Standups, backlog, QA, feedback cycles. All landing on the same day, sometimes the same hour. I wasn't smooth at it. I just told myself to stay proactive, deliver things on time, and keep the pressure as low as I could manage.
The founder and tech lead had my back. That mattered more than I probably said at the time.
And then we shipped it. Version 1, out to pilot customers, more or less as planned. After that we discontinued it and started building V2 from scratch with far more planning and sophistication. But that's a different story for another time.
Looking back, the thing that period taught me isn't really a process lesson. It's simpler than that.
When the team gets cut and you still have to show up the next morning, the only real move is to treat it like a challenge instead of a disaster. Take on less pressure than the situation is trying to hand you. And if your management is genuinely in your corner, lean on that. It makes more difference than most people will admit.
The five of us shipped a product. That's what happened.
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