Will Larson's Blog, page 4

Exploring for strategy.

A surprising number of strategies are doomed from inceptionbecause their authors get attached to one particular approachwithout considering alternatives that would work better fortheir current circumstances.This happens when engineers want to pick tools solely becausethey are trending, and when executives insist on adopting thetech stack from their prior organization where they felt comfortable.

Exploration is the antidote to early anchoring, forcing you to considerthe problem widely befo...

How should we control access to user data?

At some point in a startup’s lifecycle, they decide that theyneed to be ready to go public in 18 months, and a flurry of IPO-readinessactivity kicks off.This strategy focuses on a company working on IPO readiness,which has identified a gap in their internal controls for managingaccess to their users’ data. It’s a company that wants to meaningfullyimprove their security posture around user data access, but which hashad a number of failed security initiatives over the years.

Most of those i...

Our own agents with their own tools.

Entering 2025, I decided to spend some time exploring the topic of agents.I started reading Anthropic’s Building effective agents,followed by Chip Huyen’s AI Engineering.I kicked off a major workstream at work on using agents, and I also decided to do a personal experiment of sorts.This is a general commentary on building that project.

What I wanted to build was a simple chat interface where I could write prompts, select models,and have the model use tools as appropriate.My side goal was t...

Is engineering strategy useful?

While I frequently hear engineers bemoan a missing strategy,they rarely complete the thought by articulating why the missing strategy matters.Instead, it serves as more of a truism: the economy used to be better,children used to respect their parents,and engineering organizations used to have an engineering strategy.

This chapter starts by exploring something I believe quite strongly:there’s always an engineering strategy, even if there’s nothing written down.From there, we’ll discuss why ...

"We're a product engineering company!" -- Engineering strategy at Calm.

In my career, the majority of the strategy work I’ve done has been in non-executive roles,things like Uber’s service migration.Joining Calm was my first executive role, where I was able to not just propose, but also mandate, strategy.

Like almost all startups, the engineering team was scattered when I joined.Was our most important work creating more scalable infrastructure?Was our greatest risk the failure to adopt leading programming languages?How did we rescue the stuck service decomposit...

Bridging theory and practice in engineering strategy.

Some people I’ve worked with have lost hope that engineering strategyactually exists within any engineering organizations.I imagine that they, reading through thesteps to build engineering strategy,or the strategy for navigating private equity ownership,are not impressed. Instead, these ideas probably come across as theoretical at best.In less polite company, they might describe these ideas as fake constructs.

Let’s talk about it! Because they’re right. In fact, they’re right in two differ...

Uber's service migration strategy circa 2014.

In early 2014, I joined as an engineering manager for Uber’s Infrastructure team.We were responsible for a wide number of things, including provisioning new services.While the overall team I led grew significantly over time,the subset working on service provisioning nevergrew beyond four engineers.

Those four engineers successfully migrated 1,000+ services onto a new, future-proofed service platform.More importantly, they did it while absorbing the majority, although certainly not the entir...

Service onboarding model for Uber (2014).

At the core ofUber’s service migration strategy (2014)is understanding the service onboarding process, and identifying the leversto speed up that process. Here we’ll develop asystem modelrepresenting that onboarding process, and exercise the model to test a numberof hypotheses about how to best speed up provisioning.

In this chapter, we’ll cover:

Where the model of service onboarding suggested we focus on effortsDeveloping a system model using the lethain/systems package on Github.That ...

Refining strategy with Wardley Mapping.

The first time I heard about Wardley Mapping wasfrom Charity Majors discussing it on Twitter.Of the three core strategy refinement techniques,this is the technique that I’ve personally used the least.Despite that, I decided to include it in this book because ithighlights how many different techniques can be used for refining strategy,and also because it’s particularly effective at looking at the broadest ecosystemsyour organization exists in.

Where the other techniques like systems thinki...

How to effectively refine engineering strategy.

In Jim Collins’ Great by Choice,he develops the concept of Fire Bullets, Then Cannonballs.His premise is that you should cheaply test new ideas before fully committing to them.Your organization can only afford firing a small number of cannonballs, but it can bankroll far more bullets,so why not use bullets to derisk your cannonballs’ trajectories?

This chapter presents a series of concrete techniques that I have personallyused to effectively refine strategies well before reaching the cannon...