Will Larson's Blog, page 31

More great memos.

I spent some time a few months ago reading @sriramk’s list of great memos, and tweeted some of the ones I particularly enjoyed. Someone privately pointed out to me that the authors I'd tweeted were all men. I was disappointed that I hadn’t noticed that earlier myself, and decided to spend some time exploring for great memos written by a more diverse cohort of authors.

Before going too far, a quick note on how Sriram defined a memo in his collection:

I'm fascinated by interesting memos written...

Your first 90 days as CTO or VP Engineering.

Whenever I transition to a new opportunity, I think about how to start well. How can I ramp up as effectively as possible? How do I balance the urge to “show value” early with making the right decisions?

The canonical book on starting a new role is The First 90 Days, and I got a fair amount out of it when I read it six or seven years ago. That said, its advice skews generic at times. Yes, I should learn as much as possible. Yes, I should achieve alignment and negotiate for resources. Yes, I...

How to navigate and/or survive your acquihire.

As I wrote up the story of SocialCode’s acquihire of the Digg team, I had to keep editing out meta-commentary about the process. It’s hard to tell a coherent story when you keep slipping into tips and observations, so I pulled them out and collected them here.

This post is focused on talent acquisitions, sometimes called “acquihires”, where an acquiring company wants to acquire another company’s team. I’ll focus on a typical Silicon Valley acquihire, which focus on acquiring the engineering...

How the Digg team was acquihired.

About a year after the catastrophic Digg V4 launch, our last-ditch experiment to salvage the site showed a spark of hope. We’d cajoled our way into a Facebook beta that allowed us to publish each Digger’s read articles into their Facebook newsfeed, sending every clicking friend directly to Digg’s permalink page, where they might click on our ads and maybe even create an account.

The early statistics were grave. An entrepreneur-in-residence at one of our investors built us a virality model...

2019 in review.

This has been a really special year for me personally, enough so that even though I won’t get into full detail about the two things (one professional, one personal) I’m most excited about (more in a month or two), writing a year-in-review still fills me with gratitude.

Previously: 2018, 2017

Goals for 2019

I never posted my goals for 2019, but I wrote them up in a personal note, and I’ll start by reflecting on them a bit. A year ago when I set these goals, I was feeling a bit stretched by the...

"Good Process is Evolved, Not Designed" in 97 Things Every Engineering Manager Should Know

Earlier in the year, I got the chance to contribute an article to Camille Fournier's latest book, 97 Things Every Engineering Manager Should Know, and jumped at the chance to write something. The piece I contributed is Good Process is Evolved, Not Designed, and is a streamlined version of an earlier blog post, which I've also converted into a short conference talk.

I enjoyed this process quite a bit, in particular because it was an opportunity to work in a different medium with different...

Incident response, programs and you(r startup).

During an incident at Digg, a coworker once quipped, “We serve funny cat pictures, who cares if we’re down for a little while?” If that’s your attitude towards reliability, then you probably don’t need to formalize handling incidents, but if you believe what you’re doing matters – and maybe today’s a good time to start planning how to walk out that door if you don’t – then at some point your company is going to have to become predictably reliable.

Having worked with a number of...

Mail bag for December 2019: when your team wants your job, personal brand, and service registries.

Thanksgiving week started well, and then took a hard pivot towards influenza, which meant that I haven’t had much energy to write or think over the past bit. I did get a handful of interesting questions emailed in though, so I figured I’d do an email grab bag of three anonymized questions that came in over the past week and an answer to each.

When your team competes with you

The first question is a particularly challenging one, dealing with a team member who wanted your job when you were...

Maintaining platform-product fit.

In 2011, Steve Yegge wrote his Google Platforms Rant, which states "the Golden Rule of platforms is that you Eat Your Own Dogfood," arguing that APIs are good to the extent that the folks developing them depend on their quality and feature coverage. The memo came to mind earlier this week when a coffee chat with a friend veered towards their conviction that Google Cloud lacks necessary functionality because folks within Google simply don't build upon their cloud offering. Amazon, conversely,...

"How to successfully design organizational processes"

The first piece I wrote in 2019 was about good process being evolved rather than designed in a one-off fashion, which served as the basis for a talk I gave at SFELC's January 2019 conference.

Watch the video from that talk on the SFELC site, featuring some of my favorite slides I've ever made. Of the talks I've given so far, this one is both literally and figuratively unique because I custom made it for the event, and have only given it that one time.

While the video isn't embeddable click...