Will Larson's Blog, page 16

Measuring an engineering organization.

For the past several years, I’ve run a learning circle with engineering executives. The most frequent topic that comes up is career management–what should I do next? The second most frequent topic is measuring engineering teams and organizations–my CEO has asked me to report monthly engineering metrics, what should I actually include in the report?

Any discussion about measuring engineering organizations quickly unearths strong opinions. Anything but sprint points! Just use SPACE! Track incident...

A brief rant on converging compliance regimes.

Although I’ve never worked exclusively on compliance, much of my work over the past decade has touched on reconciling between product and compliance goals, and over that time I’ve developed something of a pet theory on the evolution of compliance over the next five to ten years: I expect customer-oriented compliance to converge on a unified set of controls.

While today there’s a wide distance between GDPR, CCPA, HITRUST, FedRAMP and SOC2, I generally expect the gaps between these various framewo...

Lessons not worth learning.

A few weeks ago I had a call with a startup founder who was frustrated with their team. The team kept getting distracted by interesting work, and was avoiding the most important work to move the business forward. Was it possible to build a team that simply does the important work without getting distracted by more interesting or energizing work? Why can’t you build a team that operates rationally to the businesses interests rather than their own?

My advice was that there are basically two paths ...

2022 in review.

Previously: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017

After the past two years, it’s odd to write an annual reflection where my first thoughts are happy rather than bleak.The truth is that there is a lot of bleak out there right now–just look at the layoffs and the funding environment–but whilelast year was an unusual and challenging one for me, this one was relatively quiet for me and my family.

That said, even a quiet year is worth a bit of introspection, so here is my annual note.

(If you’re writing a y...

2019 - 2022 reading recap.

If this seems redundant, I did indeed accidentally release a draft version of this list earlier in the year.

In 2018, I put together my book recommendations,and while I don’t currently have any ambition to reflesh that list (those are pretty timeless books!),I decided to collect the non-fiction books I’ve read since writing that list through the end of 2022,which is roughly 2019 through 2022.I’m certain that I’ll miss a few, but here is a fairly representative list,particularly those where ...

When shouldn't you roll out business reviews?

Earlier this week I got an email from a friend asking whether they should roll out business reviews at the company they’d just joined as the head of engineering, and inevitably the answer is, “Maybe!”

I recently pulled together a template for Monthly Business Reviews, which are an exceptionally effective meeting format for operating a business: each functional leader writes a metrics-heavy report about their past month, and discusses it with the other functional leaders. A well-run business revi...

Company, team, self.

Back when I was managing at Uber, I latched onto a thinking tool that I drilled into the teams I worked with: reach the right outcomes by prioritizing the company first, your team second, and yourself third. This company/team/self framework proved itself a helpful decision-making tool, and almost always led to the “correct” outcome. It also helped me articulate why I disagreed with some of my peers’ decisions, which violated this hierarchy by placing individual or team preferences over the compa...

Twitter.

I joined Twitter in March, 2007.My first tweet was anything but glorious,“Sitting in Networking class. Not enjoying it.”Ten tweets before receiving my first like.Another fifty before my second.Reading my early tweets, I was confused by this lack of likes.I slowly remembered: likes didn’t exist. Instead there were favorites,bookmarks rather than algorithmic boosts.The absence of replies also felt odd.I was clearly having conversationswith two college classmate (the only people I knew on...

The flying wedge.

When I worked at Yahoo!, our team needed another engineering manager. We didn’t run a hiring process, or even do interviews. Instead, our Director brought on a colleague he’d worked with before. That new manager soon decided he needed a tech lead on his team. We didn’t run a hiring process, do interviews, or consider candidates on the existing team. Instead, our new manager brought over one of his previous colleagues. A third previous colleague reached out to our Director, and without a single i...

Work hard / work smart.

Twitter, Lyft, Stripe and several other companies had major layoffs last week, and with the undeniable tragedy of layoffs, a frequent debate has reemerged. Are the tech employees working hard enough? Is working hard a sign of puritanical virtue? Are long hours a sign of inefficient production that ignores a century of productivity research?

Unless you place a premium on social networking engagement, participating in these debates isn’t very rewarding. Folks enter the discussion with their mind m...