Managing Engineering Teams Through a Bull Market

In Q1 2021, one of my best engineers came to me with an offer. Not a competing job offer — a call from a DeFi protocol offering him a token allocation worth, at current prices, more than five years of his salary. He didn’t want to leave. He asked me what I thought he should do.

Running an engineering team through a crypto bull market is its own management challenge that nobody writes about. Here’s what I learned.

The Retention Environment

In 2021, the average crypto engineer received multiple competing offers per month. Retention wasn’t about comp alone — it was about mission clarity and who they were working alongside.

When your engineers are getting 3 cold DMs a day with 2x salary offers, everything about management changes.

By mid-2021, the talent market for engineers with Solidity experience, DeFi protocol knowledge, or crypto infrastructure background had gone from competitive to surreal. Anonymous protocols were posting job listings with token allocations listed as a primary compensation component. Token allocations valued at millions of dollars at current prices, for roles at projects with no product, no users, and five-person “teams.”

The rational short-term financial calculation was often: leave your job, take the token allocation, hope prices hold long enough to vest something meaningful.

The engineers who left mostly came back within a year. Some did very well financially. Most found that anonymous protocol development was not what the job listings implied.

But managing through this environment required rethinking what we offered beyond cash compensation.

What Actually Retained Good People

Meaningful technical problems. The engineers who stayed weren’t primarily motivated by maximizing short-term income. They were motivated by problems worth solving. Building payment infrastructure that actually moves money for real people — that has a clarity of purpose that “governance token farming protocol” doesn’t.

When I sat down with engineers about retention, the conversation almost always came back to: “What are we building that matters?” If you can answer that question well and honestly, you’re ahead of most of your competition.

Equity in the mission. Not just financial equity — though that matters — but actual ownership of decisions. Engineers who felt like their opinions shaped the direction of the product were more resistant to external offers. Engineers who felt like they were executing specs were easier to poach.

Honesty about tradeoffs. I stopped pretending that every job had the upside potential of a token allocation at a bull market protocol. We talked honestly about the risk-reward of different paths. Some people decided the token gamble was right for them. More decided it wasn’t, especially after seeing the first wave of disappointments.

What I Got Wrong

Not adjusting compensation fast enough. Salary benchmarks were lagging the market by 6-12 months. By the time I was aware we were under-market, some of the damage was already done in terms of people feeling undervalued.

Under-investing in career development during growth. When you’re scaling fast, training and development gets deprioritized because everyone is focused on shipping. This is a mistake that compounds — engineers who feel like they’re growing are more loyal than engineers who feel like they’re stagnating, regardless of market conditions.

Not building enough redundancy. When key people left (for whatever reason), the knowledge concentration problem became acute. Documentation culture is boring to enforce but essential for resilience.

The Team Structure That Worked

By late 2021, we’d landed on a team structure that I think held up well:

Small, focused pods with clear ownership — not feature teams, but capability teams. A pod owned the card issuance system end-to-end: the APIs, the processing logic, the monitoring, the incidents. Engineers in that pod knew their system deeply and felt real ownership over its health.

Cross-pod technical exchange — weekly deep dives where pods shared what they were building, what they were learning, what was hard. This kept knowledge distributed and created the low-level collegial environment that engineers actually want.

Direct access to context — every engineer knew why we were building what we were building, who was using it, what was working and what wasn’t. No information hierarchy.

The bull market eventually corrected. The team we’d built through it was better for the pressure.