An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

by Will Larson

They focus on four measures of developer velocity: Delivery lead time is the time from the creation of code to its use in production. Deployment frequency is how often you deploy code. Change fail rate is how frequently changes fail. Time to restore service is the time spent recovering from defects.

With all of this in mind, take an hour and write up as many goals as you can for what you’d like to accomplish in the next one to five years. Then prioritize the list, pick a few that you’d like to focus on for the next three to six months, and share it with your manager at your next one-on-one.

Stop doing things. When you’re quite underwater, a surprisingly underutilized technique is to stop doing things. If you drop things in an unstructured way, this goes very poorly, but done with structure this works every time. Identify some critical work that you won’t do, recategorize that newly unstaffed work as organizational risk,42 and then alert your team and management chain that you won’t be doing it.

A few years back, one of the leaders I worked with told me, “With the right people, any process works, and with the wrong people, no process works.”

Lately, I’ve come to have something of a mantra for guiding decisionmaking: do the right thing for the company, the right thing for the team, and the right thing for yourself, in that order.