An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

by Will Larson

(The most controversial guides tend to be statements about the value of current work versus future work, for example doing investment work today that will pay off in two years but limit value in the short term. One technique that I’ve found useful for this particular scenario is specifying quotas for both immediate and long-term work.)

If you’ve poured time into explaining both your velocity and priorities but your perspective still isn’t resonating, then it’s fairly likely that you have a relationship problem to address. In that case, the next step isn’t investing more energy in explaining your constraints, but instead working on how you partner with your individual stakeholders.

We have such a huge impact on the people we work with—and especially on the people who work “for” us—and taking responsibility for that impact is fundamental to good management.

I try to start debugging problems from the relationship angle, and I find this technique pretty effective.

learning from your peers is critical to success. However, it’s also important to be honest about which of your practices are truly best practices and which you’re following on autopilot.

The worst theory of management is to not have one at all, but the second worst is one that doesn’t change.

I’ve seen the opposite happen just as often, when experienced, successful managers from well-established companies dive into a startup and exit soon thereafter with a legacy of ineffective initiatives.

execution is the primary currency in the growth plates. That’s because you typically have a surplus of fairly obvious ideas to try, and there is constrained bandwidth for evaluating those ideas.

What folks in the growth plates need is help reducing and executing the existing backlog of ideas, not adding more ideas that must be evaluated. Teams in these scenarios are missing the concrete resources necessary to execute, and supplying those resources is the only way to help. Giving more ideas feels helpful, but isn’t.

So often, we make solid executors responsible for slower-growth areas—we need the innovators in the highest-growth ones—but the opposite tends to work better. As a manager, this is the environment for you to do the basics very, very well. Spend time building rich relationships, gelling your team, working with them on career development. Build up so that when innovation or external change pushes you off your local maxima, you and the team are ready and rested.

In management, power comes from a healthy team. Some managers focus so much on following their management’s wishes that their team evaporates beneath them.

Your team’s success and recognition depend significantly on your relationship with your management chain. It’s common for excellent work to go unnoticed because it was never shared upward.

When you’re behind, it can be tempting to spend all of your time firefighting and neglect hiring, but if your business is growing quickly, then eventually you hire or burn out.

Your team’s impact depends largely on doing something that other teams or customers want, and getting it shipped out the door. This is extraordinarily hard without a supportive social network within the company.

To have a good relationship with your manager, you have to give them room to make mistakes.

Delegation is important, but it’s easy to go too far and ignore the critical responsibilities that you’ve asked others to take on, only to discover an easily averted disaster later on.

Particularly at larger companies, it can become frequent to make decisions that appear to be fundamentally disconnected from reality.

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.

You can’t scale your impact or engage your team if you don’t give them enough room to do things differently than you would. Many organizations become bottlenecked on approvals, which is a sure proxy for lack of trust.

It can be easy to only see what’s going wrong, and forget to celebrate the good stuff. Down this path lie frustration and madness.

Things your manager should know about you: What problems you’re trying solve. How you’re trying to solve each of them. That you’re making progress. (Specifically, that you’re not stuck.) What you prefer to work on. (So that they can staff you properly.) How busy you are. (So that they know if you can take on an opportunity that comes up.) What your professional goals and growth areas are. Where you are between bored and challenged. How you believe you’re being measured. (A rubric, company values, some KPIs, etc.)

There is a lot less competition for hard work.

Project-managing an initiative working with 50 engineering managers is a far better learning opportunity than managing an organization of 50, and it builds the same skills.

you can always find an opportunity to increase your scope and learning, even in a company that doesn’t have room for more directors or vice presidents.

If you’ve been focused on growing the size of your team as the gateway to career growth, call bullshit on all that,13 and look for a gap in your organization or company that you can try to fill. You’ll be a lot happier.

It took me two years as a manager to reach the “leadership is lonely” phase. Folks had warned me that it would happen, and it did. The team was struggling to acclimatize after acquisition, and I felt like I was carrying the stress alone. I saw the problems, but didn’t know how to make progress on them.

Where you used to get direct, actionable advice, now you’re listening for ghosts: grumbles on your team about too much technical debt, the rumor that two peers are engaged in some light feuding, agitation where there was previously calm.

That initial instinct to leave after hitting a pocket of seeming irrelevance is a comforting one, but it’s the wrong way to go. You can certainly avoid the current swells of ambivalence by switching jobs, but if you’re successful at another company then you’ll end up in the same situation.

The one remaining problem is that almost no one will have the time to soak up the full detail of your overly precise document, so the final step is to distill it into something comprehensible without hours of close reading. I’m still working on the best way to do this, but I suspect that it’s cutting all unnecessary, and even most essential, complexity in order to capture as much of the meaning as possible in three to four bullet points.

The skill that scales the worst is outworking your problems.

your ability to put your head down and solve gritty, important problems was probably a big part of how you were promoted. Now it’s the wrong answer to most of your problems.

the abacus tallying our actions is organizational culture.

an inclusive organization is one in which individuals have access to opportunity and membership. Opportunity is having access to professional success and development. Membership is participating as a version of themselves that they feel comfortable with.

The key question is whether you’ll continue to respect your processes when it’s inconvenient to do so. If one of your best team members wants a specific opportunity, are you willing to run an open application process? What if they plan to leave your company otherwise? Would you be willing to bypass your processes to keep them?

Rubrics everywhere. Every important people decision should have a rubric around how folks are evaluated. This is true for promotions, performance designations, hiring, transitions into management, and pretty much everything else!

Selecting project leaders.1 Having a structured approach to selecting project leads allows you to learn from previous selections, and to ensure that you’re not concentrating opportunity on a small set of individuals.

Explicit budgets. Many companies take a “spend it like your own money” approach to budgets, which often leads to large inconsistencies across individuals. Instead of saying that you’ll pay for teams to attend a reasonable number of conferences per year, specify a fixed number. In...

Nudge involvement. Many people are uncomfortable applying to opportunities, using education budgets, asking for mentorship, etc. It’s very effective to reach out to those folks directly and recommend they apply. Even more powerful is showing them where they fall on a distribution: it’s one thing to know that you’ve never used your education b...

Education programs. Create ongoing training and learning programs that are available for everyone, or, ...

I’ve found measurability of opportunity to be surprisingly high, which is one of the reasons I think it’s an effective pillar in thinking about inclusion.

Retention is the most important measure of availability of opportunity, although it’s also a very lagging indicator. This should be the first thing you’re paying attention to, but you must recognize that it’s slow to show change.

Usage rate is how often folks get picked in project selection.2 The number of distinct team members picked to lead critical projects is a particularly interesting measure.

Level distribution is useful, in particular comparing cohorts of folks with different backgrounds. People want role models for themselves in senior roles at the company where they work, which is why looking at the representation of underrepresented minorities and women is ...

Time at level is how long team members wait between promotions. How does this compare across cohorts? Something to watch for is that this number is also greatly influenced by initial level at hiring. For example, time at level might look equival...

I’ve found that friendly persistence, along with sharing your thinking behind the asks, works well to get coworkers working with you.

Recurring weekly events allow coworkers to interact socially. These are held during working hours, are open to folks from many different teams to attend, and are optional. One of my personal favorites is hosting a paper-reading group.

Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) create opportunities for folks with similar backgrounds to build community.

Team offsites once a quarter or so are a good chance to pause, reflect, and work together differently. Spending a day together learning and discussing is surprisingly effective at making individuals feel like a team. This is particularly true for groups of managers, whose daily cadence is typically more in tune with their teams than with their peers.

Coffee chats, perhaps randomly assigned by Donut,4 get folks from different teams interacting when they don’t...

Team lunches give folks time to relax a bit and interact socially. Held once a week or so, they can become a pleasant ritual. These can be a bit risky, at least for folks (like early hires) who feel uncomfortable in their team. Navigating the social more...