I still remember exactly where I was when I found out.
Just got off a plane from Albania. Walking down the stairs, phone in hand, reading a company-wide email about redundancies.
I panicked. Immediately messaged my manager asking if they could tell me anything more. They couldn’t. So I spent the next few days in that particular kind of limbo where you are trying to act normal while your brain is quietly catastrophising every possible outcome.
My job was safe. Not everyone’s was.
From Five to Three
When I joined, there was a proper team. Established, supportive, the kind of environment where you learn fast because there is always someone to ask. Cheerful retros. A growing group of five or six people who actually knew what they were doing.
After the redundancies we were three. Me, the lead, and a PO.
Then the lead left. Voluntarily. He went to Capgemini, which was absolutely the right move for him, and I was genuinely happy for him. I was also, if I am being honest, terrified. Because now it was just me. One developer. A PO. And a Dynamics 365 database with over a hundred thousand client records.
I did not feel ready. I am not sure I was ready. But ready stopped being relevant the moment I became the only option.
You Either Step Up or You Don’t
I stepped up.
Not dramatically. Not all at once. Just one day at a time, one problem at a time, until I knew the database better than I knew anything else. Every table, every relationship, every flow, every quirk. I became the point of contact for all things Dynamics because there was nobody else to be. And somewhere in that process, without me noticing exactly when, I stopped feeling like I was holding on and started feeling like I was in charge.
I am not sure whether I grew enough for the responsibility, or whether the responsibility grew me. Probably both. All I know is that being thrown in forced something out of me that a comfortable team setup might never have.
Then It Got Bigger
We sourced an offshore development team. Suddenly I was leading a group of five or six developers, most of whom knew more than me technically, every single one of them. What I had that they did not was the internal knowledge. The history. The context. The understanding of why things were built the way they were and what the organisation actually needed.
That knowledge did not diminish. It compounded.
Almost two years on from the moment I walked down those plane stairs reading that email, nothing gets developed without me knowing when and why. I run weekly meetings with advisors, with Dynamics champions I have personally appointed, with the offshore team, with citizen developers I have trained myself. Every two weeks a new development drops. Release notes go out. People who used to complain about the system now look forward to seeing what is coming next.
We built that. From three people and a database that nobody trusted.
What I Actually Think About Working Alone
There is something uniquely clarifying about being the only person. No diffusion of responsibility. No waiting for someone else to notice a problem. No ambiguity about whose decision it is.
It is also exhausting in ways that are hard to explain to someone who has not done it. The weight of knowing that if something breaks at 8am on a Monday, you are it. There is no escalation path. There is just you and the problem.
But I think working alone, or close to it, made me a better developer than a comfortable team ever would have. Not because teams are bad. Teams are great. But because pressure reveals things about yourself that comfort does not. I found out what I was actually capable of not by being supported through challenges, but by having no choice except to meet them.
I would not change how it went. Even the Albania stairs moment. Even the panic.
That moment was the start of something I am genuinely proud of.