An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

by Will Larson

When you apply your guiding policies to your diagnosis, you get your actions. Folks are often comfortable with hard decisions in the abstract, but struggle to translate policies into the specific steps to implement them. This is typically the easiest part to write, but publishing it and following through with it can be a significant test of your commitment. In the example above, your specific actions might be to stop attending weekly team meetings in order to free up time and move to a monthly metrics review, combined with blocked-out focus hours that you unapologetically shelter. When you read good, coherent actions, you think, “This is going to be uncomfortable, but I think it can work.” When you read bad ones, you think, “Ah, we got afraid of the consequences, and we aren’t really changing anything.”