An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

by Will Larson

On the other hand, it will also keep them busy enough that they won’t be tempted to create work for their team.

Keep them busy

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

Preserve team

The second most effective time thief that I’ve found is ad hoc interruptions: getting pinged on HipChat or Slack, taps on the shoulder, alerts from your on-call system, high-volume email lists, and so on.

This is remarkably uncomfortable because we want to be helpful humans, but it becomes necessary as the number of interruptions climbs higher.

The best tool that I’ve found for this is to block out a few large chunks of time each week to focus.

the best system rewrite is the one that didn’t happen,

refactoring

keep your interfaces generic,

And when they do occasionally fail, make sure that they fail with a limited blast radius.

What motivates your users to engage with your systems? How can you better enable users to accomplish their goals?

What if there were no external factors forcing you to show results until two years out?

people often under-prioritize quick, easy wins. If you’re in the uncommon position of understanding

Can you find users who are willing to be the first users for the solution?

Justify switching costs. What will the costs of switching be for users who move to your solution? Even if folks want to use it, high switching costs may mean that they simply won’t be able to. Test with your potential users if they’d be willing to pay the full cost of migrating to your solution instead of their existing planned work.

This ought to be a benign event:

Strategies are grounded documents which explain the trade-offs and actions that will be taken to address a specific challenge. Visions are aspirational documents that enable individuals who don’t work closely together to make decisions that fit together cleanly.

Good goals are a composition of four specific kinds of numbers: A target states where you want to reach. A baseline identifies where you are today. A trend describes the current velocity. A time frame sets bounds for the change.

two tests of an effective goal are whether someone who doesn’t know much about an area can get a feel for a goal’s degree of difficulty, and whether afterward they can evaluate if it was successfully achieved.

The good news is that while migrations are hard, there is a pretty standard playbook that works remarkably well: de-risk, enable, then finish.

Double down on doing skip-level one-on-ones.

Roadmaps align on problem selection and solution validation.

less effective outside the intentionally constrained possibility spaces.

prototypical head of engineering will be skilled at organizational design, process design, business strategy, recruiting, mentoring, coaching, public speaking, and written communication.

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.

Mistake title for impact.

Confuse authority with truth. Authority lets you get away with weak arguments and poor justifications, but it’s a pretty expensive way to work with people, because they’ll eventually turn off their minds and simply follow orders—if they’re in a complicated compensation or life situation, that is. Otherwise, they’ll just leave.