Will Larson's Blog, page 11

Team Charters are a trap.

I’m cleaning out old lingering drafts. This one’s on why I dislike Team Charters.

Recently an email came in asking about writing team charters. I’ve worked at a number of companies that asked teams to write charters, and I think it’s an interesting project. That said, it’s not a project I’d generally prioritize. If you pushed me on this topic, I’d probably suggest you write an engineering strategy document from the perspective of your team. A few thoughts on what team charters try to solve, and...

A bit late, but I did leave Calm.

I meant to post this when I left Calm earlier this year, as a ending note to my post on joining Calm, but instead I got focused on joining Carta and writing An Engineering Executive’s Primer. I’m cleaning out some of my old drafts, and posting this as an artifact of that moment. Although I ended up starting a role sooner than expected–it was the right opportunity to accept–I did get to spend more time with my kid, finish my next book, and get my running distance back up, so I’ll call it a succes...

Benchmarking.

Many of the most important questions for running an organization don’t have clear answers. In most engineering organizations, both the teams working on infrastructure and the teams working on product feel they are undersized. It’s also true that most individuals feel they are undercompensated. In the boom times, there is often enough investor money laying around to say yes to all these questions, but many leaders are acutely learning the long-term costs of expanding our budget too far.

While the...

Getting lucky isn't a plan.

One piece of flippant commentary that you’ll hear occasionally is that it’s “Better to be lucky than to be good.” On an individual level, it’s almost certainly true that being very lucky outperforms being quite good: I certainly know a number of folks who are financially successful after working at companies that succeeded, but where their direct impact was relatively small. Companies get lucky, too. This is true both in the sense that the door to acquisitions was much more attractive last decad...

Thoughts on writing and publishing Primer.

I’m materially finished writing my 3rd book, The Engineering Executive’s Primer. There’s one last chapter to go through tech review, and a fine line editing pass, but the hard stuff is largely done. Of course, that’s an author’s perspective, there is other hard stuff still to be done by other folks in the process, particularly formatting and printing.

Each book is an education of sorts, and I decided to work with O’Reilly on this book to push myself on structure and consistency. I think both are...

Developing leadership styles

For a long time, I found the micromanager CEO archetype very frustrating to work with. They would often pop out of nowhere, jab holes in the work I had done without understanding the tradeoffs, and then disappear when I wanted to explain my decisions. In those moments, I wished they would trust me based on my track record of doing good work. If they didn’t trust my track record, could they at least take the time to talk through the situation so I could explain my decisions?!

I longed for a more ...

Video of Solving the Eng Strategy crisis.

A few weeks ago, I shared my script for my latest talk,Solving the Engineering Strategy crisis,which I gave at QCon last week.They’ll have the conference video up in a few weeks, but I also decided to do a recordingof the final version (albeit a few weeks after the talk, so definitely a bit less practicedthan the live edition).

You can watch that video on YouTube.

As mentioned, I don’t think I was quite as practiced in this was as ideal,but would have probably never have gotten it done if...

Solving the Engineering Strategy crisis.

These are speaking notes for my October 4th, QCon talk in San Francisco.
Slides for this talk.

Over the course of my career, I’ve frequently heard from colleagues, team membersand random internet strangers with the same frustration: the company doesn’t havean Engineering strategy.I don’t think this problem is unique to Engineering: it’s also common to hearfolks complain that they’re missing a strategy for Product, Design or Business.But, whereas I don’t feel particularly confident speaking ...

Drafted Eng Executive's Primer!

Back in late April, I mentioned that I wasworking on a new book,The Engineering Executive’s Primer,with O’Reilly.I wanted to share a few notes on progress!

First, there’s a cover, shown above in this post’s image, and also in the right rail (or bottom footer if you’rereading on a smaller device). I’m quite excited about the cover, which is simple and imperfect. There is nothingpure about being an executive, it’s mostly about balancing opposing forces to the best of your ability,and I thin...

Performance & Compensation (for Eng Execs).

Uber’s original performance process was called “T3B3” and was remarkably simple: write the individuals top 3 strengths, and top 3 weaknesses, and share the feedback with them directly in person. There was a prolonged fight against even documenting the feedback, which was viewed as discouraging honesty. On the other side of things, there are numerous stories of spending months crafting Google promotion packets that still don’t get their authors promoted. Among those who’ve worked within both Uber...