An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

by Will Larson

Retention is once again the golden measure, and once again a long-trailing indicator.

Referral rate by cohort provides insight into which individuals feel comfortable asking their friends and previous coworkers to join the company.

Attendance rates for recurring events and team lunches provide some insight into whether folks feel c...

The quantity and completion rate of coffee chats are automatically...

Combine efforts on opportunity and membership, and you will find yourself solidly on the path to an inclusive organization. This strategy doesn’t have much flash, but results are louder than proclamations. The most important thing is continuing your investment over the long term. Pick a few things that you are able to sustainably continue, get started, and layer in more as you build steam.

I’ve come to believe that having a wide cohort of coworkers who lead critical projects is one of the most important signifiers of good organizational health.

Select a project leader based on the selection criteria you specified. Take the time to consider every single applicant against the criteria, and, if possible write up a paragraph or two about each of them. Once you’ve selected the leader, privately reach out to them to confirm that they’re able to commit.

Previously, you would have just sent a ping to a favored individual and they’d have been off and running, but now you have to run a slower and more deliberate process. Increasingly, though, I believe this is the most important change in my approach to leadership over the past few years. Done well, it can be the cornerstone in your efforts to grow an inclusive organization.

As your span of responsibility grows, you may not know much of your peers’ work, or you may find yourself frequently contesting against them for constrained resources. Even when surrounded by the fastest of growth, you may be awkwardly aware that you’re aspiring to move into the same, rare, roles.

These dynamics can lead to teams whose camaraderie is at best a qualified non-aggression pact, and in which collaboration is infrequent. It’s a strange tragedy that we hold ourselves accountable for building healthy, functional teams, and yet are so rarely on them ourselves.

Even with the best intentions, a member cannot optimize for their team if they’re not familiar with other members’ work. The first step to moving someone’s identity to their peers is to ensure that they know about their peers’ work. This will require a significant investment of time, likely in the form of sharing weekly progress, and the occasional opportunity for folks to dive deep into each other’s work.

When we don’t know someone well, we tend to project intentions onto them, casting them as a character in a play they themselves are unaware exists. It’s quite challenging to optimize on behalf of characters in your mental play, but it’s much easier to be understanding of people you know personally. Spending time together learning about each other, often at a team offsite, will slowly transform strangers into people.

I believe that on such teams coordination is only possible when the manager or a highly respected member operates as a referee, holding team members accountable for good behavior.

Some companies foster zero-sum cultures, in which perceived success depends on capturing scarce, metered resources, like head count. It’s hard to convince folks to coordinate under such conditions. Positive cultures center on recognizing impact, support, and development, which are all avenues that support widespread success.

The more fully you embrace optimizing for your collective peers, the closer your priorities will mirror your manager’s. Beyond practicing working from this broader lens, it will also position you for particularly useful feedback from your manager, as you’ll both be considering similar problems with shared goals.

Your peers can only provide excellent feedback if they’re aware of your work and are thinking about your work similarly to how you are.

Likewise, as you’re thinking about your peers’ work, you’ll be able to learn from how they approach it differently than you anticipate.

I believe that your career will be largely defined by getting lucky and the rate at which you learn. I have no advice about luck, but to speed up learning I have two suggestions: join a rapidly expanding company, and make your peers your first team.

Manager-of-managers searches are interesting in at least four ways: There are many folks who can’t find upward mobility within their current company. They have not managed managers before, and are looking for the opportunity. Most people with experience managing managers are happy in their current roles. The individuals interested in these roles outpace supply. This makes it more important to put in place processes like the Rooney Rule.7 You need a fair way to consider candidates within your company. It must be respectful to them yet allow you to uphold your responsibilities to the company.

Ensuring that internal candidates take part is essential to an inclusive culture. Fair consideration doesn’t mean that we prefer internal candidates. Rather, it means that there is a structured way for them to apply, and for us to consider them.

We’ve focused on testing these categories: Partnership. Have they been effective partners to their peers, and to the team that they’ve managed? Execution. Can they support the team in operational excellence? Vision. Can they present a compelling, energizing vision of the future state of their team and its scope? Strategy. Can they identify the necessary steps to transform the present into their vision? Spoken and written communication. Can they convey complicated topics in both written and verbal communication? Can they do all this while being engaging and tuning the level of detail to their audience? Stakeholder management. Can they make others, especially executives, feel heard? Can they make these stakeholders feel confident that they’ll address any concerns?

Unless your problem is that people aren’t trying hard, the “work harder” mantra only breeds hero programmers whose heroic ways make it difficult for nonheroes to contribute meaningfully.

You can rehabilitate heroes, but it’s touch-and-go from the beginning, and healing takes time. They might hate you for a while, and they probably should, because you created them with your ham-fisted attempt to fix your current problem.

Stocks and flows are especially valuable in understanding the failure of projects and teams. Projects fall behind one sprint at a time. Technical debt strangles projects over months. Projects fail slowly—and fixing them takes time, too.

Your options for addressing a broken system depend on whether you’re in a position to set policy. If you set the original direction and have the leverage to change directions, then resetting is as simple as standing up and taking the bullet for the fiasco you’re embroiled in.

Without policy, your tool is stepping back and allowing the brokenness to collapse under its own weight. A deeply flawed system can’t be saved by band-aids, but it can easily absorb your happiness to slightly extend its viability. If you step back, you conserve your energy and avoid creating rifts by pushing others away in hero mode, and you will be ready to be a part of a new—hopefully more functional—system after the reset does occur.

Projects fail all the time, people screw up all the time. Usually it’s by failing to acknowledge missteps that we exacerbate them. If we acknowledge errors quickly, and cut our losses on bad decisions before burning ourselves out, then we can learn from our mistakes and improve.

Kill your heroes and stop doing it harder. Don’t trap yourself in your mistakes, learn from them and move forward.

as managers, we have an outsize influence in reducing the role of luck in the careers of others.

The pool of once-phenomenal companies is quite large: Yahoo!, Oracle, and VMware, to name a few.

Working at a company isn’t a single continuous experience. Rather it’s a mix of stable eras and periods of rapid change that bridge between eras.