An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

by Will Larson

Speak in threes. Narrow your message down to three concise points, make them your refrain, and continue to refer back to your three speaking points.

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One of the trickiest, and most common, leadership scenarios is leading without authority, and I’ve written about one of the styles that I’ve found surprisingly effective in those conditions. I call it Model, Document, Share.

Then just start running kanban. Don’t publicize it, don’t make a big deal about it, just start doing it with your team. Frame it as a short experiment with the team, and start trying it. Keep iterating on it until you’re confident it works.

Mandates assume: It’s better to adopt a good-enough approach quickly.

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Model, Document, Share assumes: It’s better to adopt a great approach slowly.

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Start with the conclusion. Particularly in written communication, folks skim until they get bored and then stop reading. Accommodate this behavior by starting with what’s important, instead of building toward it gradually.

Frame why the topic matters. Typically, you’ll be presenting on an area that you’re intimately familiar with, and it’s probably very obvious to you why the work matters. This will be much less obvious to folks who don’t think about the area as often. Start by explaining why your work matters to the company.

Everyone loves a narrative. Another aspect of framing the topic is providing a narrative of where things are, how you got here, and where you’re going now. This should be a sentence or two along the lines of, “Last year, we had trouble closing several important customers due to concerns about our scalability. We identified our databases as our constraints to scaling, and since then our focus has been moving ...

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Tie topic to business value. One or two sentences to answer the question “Why should anyone care?”

Establish historical narrative. Two to four sentences to help folks understand how things are going, how we got here, and what the next planned step is.

Explicit ask. What are you looking for from the audience? On...

Data-driven diagnosis. Along the lines of a strategy’s diagnosis phase,39 explain the current constraints and context, primarily through data. Try to provide enough raw...

Return to explicit ask. The final step is to return to your explicit ask and ensure that you get the information or guidance you need.

This last bit is essential: it’s fine to drop things, but it’s quite bad to silently drop them.

Technical disagreements become learning opportunities for everyone.

“With the right people, any process works, and with the wrong people, no process works.”