[Uehreka]

Not a startup, and not necessarily dying, but here’s a personal anecdote of mine that goes against this:

In 2016 I was working on a UX team, making improvements to components that were used across the entire front-end of the new platform we were building. One spring afternoon I was working on a new hierarchical selector widget while a quarterly executive town hall was playing on the projector in our team room. Midway through writing an AngularJS directive, our head of product surprise announced that we were pivoting and that the platform we had been building for the past year was going to be mostly thrown out. I basically closed my editor and never touched that component again.

The upshot here is that in startups or big companies, change can come very suddenly. And when big problems with a strategy are only known to those at the top, it makes the sudden changes even more surprising for those down the ladder. If you’ve got a bad board, you might find out about a change that you need to make the day that you need to make it.