Will Larson's Blog, page 19

Stripe's model of product-led, developer-centric growth.

Recently, I got an email from someone asking about Stripe’s approachto product-led, developer-centric growth.If you really want a unique insight into Stripe,you’re undoubtedly better off reading Stripe’s 2021 update,but here are my general notes on Stripe as a microcosm of product-led, developer-centric growth.

from Sequoia's The Market Curve

A good place to start this journey is with the market curve, with this one specifically from Sequoia, which segmentscompanies by the customer cohort ...

Mailbag: Resources for Engineering Directors.

Recently I got an interesting question from someone looking for resources for Engineering Directors,as distinct from general engineering management:

I was wondering if you’ve written any posts geared towards engineering directors or have any recs for posts others have writtenI’m mainly looking for advice on how to manage projects from two layers away. How do I give managers creative freedomto manage however they like while also stressing the importance of deadlines?

A few books that initial...

Generating a daily snapshot of Twitter Search results.

Over the past few years I’ve gotten into the unhelpful habit of checkingTwitter search to see if folks have mentioned my writing. I don’t actually doanything with that though, beyond perhaps leaving a “like”.I enjoy using Twitter, but this part of how I use Twitter is just an unhelpfulhabit to waste time, so I wanted to try automating it away.

I got started by creating a new Twitter Developer account,and then wrote up a simple script, github repository, and github action in lethain/social-c...

Should you prioritize infrastructure costs?

This is an exerpt from Infrastructure Engineer’s section on efficiency.

Before diving into the mechanics of managing infrastructure costs, the first question to answer is whether it’s a valuable use of organizational time to make your current infrastructure spend more efficient. How you think about this will vary a bit depending on whether your company is early-stage, prioritizing growth or profitability.

Early-Stage

Generally speaking, very early-stage companies shouldn’t spend much time thinki...

What is innovation?

At a recent Engineering Q&A session, I spoke a bit about the idea of an innovation budget. We’ll accomplish more in the long-term if we protect some space for innovation in addition to maintaining our focus on immediate goals. That sounds great, someone noted in chat, but what did I even mean when I kept talking about innovation?

There are a lot of ways to think about innovation, but for me I always start with the idea of a hill climbing algorithm. You’re at a point in a two dimensional space, e...

Hard to work with.

Managing teams has taught me a lot about my own behaviors and motivations. For example, I overworked for a long time. This left me continually teetering on the brink of burnout, and I had no energy left to absorb the typical sorts of organizational changes that happen at any company. Despite doing good work, I handled change poorly, and I picked up the reputation for being difficult to manage.

I’d like to say that I learned from my mistakes directly, but the honest version is that I came to unde...

Starting to write Infrastructure Engineering.

This is my newest project, Infrastructure Engineer. You can also join the mailing list.

From late 2019 through early 2021, most of my creative output wasfocused on StaffEng, along with the overlapping book, Staff Engineer.I learned a lot working on that project,and it’s doing respectable numbers.I haven’t done much on that project in the past six months, andI spent some time over the Christmas holidays thinking aboutwhat I want to work on next.I write on this blog to capture what I learn...

Trunk and Branches Model for Scaling Infrastructure Organizations

This is an early version of a chapter for Infrastructure Engineering.

Early on in your company’s lifetime, you’ll form the seed of your infrastructure organization: a small team of four to eight engineers. Maybe you’ll call it the infrastructure team. It’s very easy to route infrastructure requests, because they all go to that one team.

Later on, things are easy as well. You have seventy engineers spread across eight to ten mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive teams with names like Sto...

Getting started with git-scraping

See this post’s code on Github.

My mother works with a food pantry and recently they have an interestinglogistical challenge: they get nearly free meat donated from another non-profit,but can only order it after the other non-profit updates their website andneed to order it somewhat immediately (within a few hours) of the website’s updates.This sort of thing is a tractable problem if you’re comfortable working in a modern businessenvironment, there are a bunch of vendors that monitor websit...

The impact of less scalable work.

Ellen Chisa has a new newsletter on product management, and I particularly enjoyed this week’s piece on 34 Product Lessons. The bullet of advice that resonated with me most deeply was:

25. When you’re promoted to VP Product, the best thing you can do is make sure to call an experienced VP Product once every week to say “is this normal?" Amazing advice gifted to me by Leland Rechis. The job is so different that it just helps to have someone to talk it through with.

This connects with something ...