An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

by Will Larson

Organizational design gets the right people in the right places, empowers them to make decisions, and then holds them accountable for their results.

Keep innovation and maintenance together.

Teams should be six to eight during steady state. To create a new team, grow an existing team to eight to ten, and then bud into two teams of four or five. Never create empty teams. Never leave managers supporting more than eight individuals.

A team is innovating when their technical debt is sustainably low, morale is high, and the majority of work is satisfying new user needs.

Fundamentally, I believe that sustained productivity comes from high-performing teams, and that disassembling a high-performing team leads to a significant loss of productivity, even if the members are fully retained. In this worldview, high-performing teams are sacred, and I’m quite hesitant to disassemble them.

I’ve found it most fruitful to move scope between teams, preserving the teams themselves.

The other approach that I’ve seen work well is to rotate individuals for a fixed period into an area that needs help.

you only get value from projects when they finish: to make progress, above all else, you must ensure that some of your projects finish.

the one thing that I’ve found at companies with very few interruptions and have observed almost nowhere else: really great, consistently available documentation.

if you’ve already rewritten a system twice, take the time to abstract the interface as part of the third rewrite and thank yourself later.

identify a few areas to improve, ensure you’re making progress on those, and give yourself permission to do the rest poorly.

the hardest part of writing a good strategy is pretty mundane. You must be honest about the constraints that are making the challenge difficult, which almost always include people and organizational aspects that are uncomfortable to acknowledge. No extent of artistry can solve a problem that you’re unwilling to admit.

environments that tolerate frequent exceptions are not only susceptible to bias but are also inefficient.

The fixed cost of creating and maintaining a policy is high enough that I generally don’t recommend writing policies that do little to constrain behavior.

Granting exceptions undermines people’s sense of fairness, and sets a precedent that undermines future policy.

There is a lot less competition for hard work.

it’s one thing to know that you’ve never used your education budget, and something else entirely to know that you’re the only person who isn’t using it.

Long term, I believe that your career will be largely defined by getting lucky and the rate at which you learn. I have no advice about luck, but to speed up learning I have two suggestions: join a rapidly expanding company, and make your peers your first team.