TL;DR - My new job started great but but I lost motivation shortly after our App was released, and was laid off later on.

Now here is the detailed version :

I'm a 32 year old male and fullstack dev. I started this startup job in September 2021 as a Lead Software Engineer. I had to help the team build this new App to replace the legacy one. There was a lot to accomplish in a very short timeframe since we had to be done by the end of December.Along with bringing in a few Agile, Testing and CI practices (that were all overlooked by then), we (and I) put a lot of energy into producing this solution as quickly as humanly possible. I worked extra hours, sometimes all weekend, to ship as fast as I possibly could, not only because they kept repeating we here behind schedule and the company could die of it, but also because I genuinely believed it was the right thing to do. It was exhausting, but I was feeling great. I felt like I belonged here. I was useful and I loved my teammates. I felt like I was working for the good of my family.

Eventually, the product was released in the very first days of January. By then, I thought we'd be somehow thanked for what we'd done, and that we'd shift our focus to a new roadmap. However, things happened somewhat differently.Not only didn't we receive any kind of gratitude, but our CTO kept angrily yelling randomly over the open space whenever something unexpected was happening. The Sales team kept coming back at us telling us this feature (that was never on our backlog in the first place) had disappeared from the app, making them lose their clients. Whenever I tried to explain that it just hadn't been put in our backlog yet and that it was probably a matter of time, my boss came back at me saying I was showing off a poor attitude, making us sound like we didn't want to do our job, and he asked me not to answer to the sales team directly anymore.Incidents like this kept happening, while our roadmap was become increasingly fuzzy and unclear. Priorities kept shifting.

At some point, our board of directors called us in, telling us we had put too much of a focus on quality during the development of the App, and that it had costed us more money than it should, thus asking us to switch to a Quick'n'dirty mindset.

I asked my boss for a better guidance and direction, but I guess he wasn't able to do any better. He and I had a few arguments about technical and architectual decisions we were making.

I have to face the reality and admit that since the launch of the app in january my involvement was decreasing. I didn't ship as fast as I used to. I had stopped working extra hours or weekends. Last month, I took two week of vacation, and when I came back my boss announced that they had decide to get rid of me, because he had lost his confidence in me, and because the company wasn't doing great financially.

So here is my question :

What do you think I should have done differently ? How could I have kept my motivation ? I'm not worried to find a new job since I'm receiving a lot of calls from recruiters, but I'm scared that I start doing great in another position, before losing motivation and repeating this pattern.

Just to give some context, I've been diagnosed with ADHD two years ago, and been taking methylphenidate ever since. It changed my life for the better, as I wouldn't be able to be productive without it.

Thanks a lot for your reading,

Rob