An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

by Will Larson

There’s a saying that people don’t leave companies, they leave managers.

Organizational design gets the right people in the right places, empowers them to make decisions, and then holds them accountable for their results.

When I have a problem that I want to solve quickly and cheaply, I start thinking about process design. A problem I want to solve permanently and we have time to go slow? That’s a good time to evolve your culture. However, if process is too weak a force, and culture too slow, then organizational design lives between those two.

An important property of teams is that they abstract the complexities of the individuals that compose them. Teams with fewer than four individuals are a sufficiently leaky abstraction that they function indistinguishably from individuals.

Keep innovation and maintenance together. A frequent practice is to spin up a new team to innovate while existing teams are bogged down in maintenance. I’ve historically done this myself, but I’ve moved toward innovating within existing teams.5 This requires very deliberate decision-making and some bravery, but in exchange you’ll get higher morale and a culture of learning, and will avoid creating a two-tiered class system of innovators and maintainers.

A team is innovating when their technical debt is sustainably low, morale is high, and the majority of work is satisfying new user needs.

the focus here is on helping people transition from a personal view of productivity to a team view.

for a team that started out falling behind and is now repaying debt, your stakeholders are probably antsy waiting for the team to start delivering new stuff, and your obligation is to prevent that impatience from causing a backslide!

maintain enough slack in your team’s schedule that the team can build quality into their work, operate continuously in innovation, and avoid backtracking.

quickest path out of innovation is to be viewed as a team that builds science projects, which inevitably leads to the team being defunded.

Adding new individuals to a team disrupts that team’s gelling process, so I’ve found it much easier to have rapid growth periods for any given team, followed by consolidation/gelling periods during which the team gels. The organization will never stop growing, but each team will.

Fundamentally, I believe that sustained productivity comes from high-performing teams, and that disassembling a high-performing team leads to a significant loss of productivity, even if the members are fully retained. In this worldview, high-performing teams are sacred, and I’m quite hesitant to disassemble them.

moving one person can shift an innovating team back into falling behind, and now neither team is doing particularly well. This is especially true on teams responsible for products and services.

The expected time to complete a new task approaches infinity as a team’s utilization approaches 100 percent, and most teams have many dependencies on other teams. Together, these facts mean you can often slow a team down by shifting resources to it, because doing so creates new upstream constraints.

“slackful” teams function as an organizational debugger:

if it’s a choice of moving people rapidly or shifting scope rapidly, I’ve found that the latter is more effective and less disruptive.

Shifting scope works better than moving people because it avoids re-gelling costs, and it preserves system behavior. Preserving behavior keeps your existing mental model intact, and if it doesn’t work out, you can always revert a workload change with less disruption than would be caused by a staffing change.

companies that mature rapidly often have tight and urgent deadlines around pursuing various critical projects, and around moving to multiple data centers, to active-active designs, and to new international regions—but

you only get value from projects when they finish: to make progress, above all else, you must ensure that some of your projects finish.

hiring and training are often a team’s biggest time investment.

Finally, the one thing that I’ve found at companies with very few interruptions and have observed almost nowhere else: really great, consistently available documentation. It’s probably even harder to bootstrap documentation into a non-documenting company than it is to bootstrap unit tests into a non-testing company, but the best solution to frequent interruptions I’ve seen is a culture of documentation, documentation reading, and a documentation search that actually works.

a related antipattern is the gatekeeper pattern. Having humans who perform gatekeeping activities creates very odd social dynamics, and is rarely a great use of a human’s time. When at all possible, build systems with sufficient isolation that you can allow most actions to go forward. And when they do occasionally fail, make sure that they fail with a limited blast radius.

that we should generally treat gatekeeping as a significant implementation bug rather than as a stability feature to be emulated.

Audit inbound chats and emails for requests and questions coming your way.

Migrations are the only mechanism to effectively manage technical debt as your company and code grow.

Spending an extra two days intentionally making your documentation clean and your tools intuitive can save years in large migrations.

recognition should be reserved for their successful completion.

Management is a profession where karma always comes due, and you’ll be better off addressing the underlying issue than continuing to work around it.

most poor working relationships are the by-product of information gaps, and nothing fills those faster than proximity.

natural authority, the respect of your peers.)

time management isn’t always everyone’s biggest challenge, but once the crises of the day recede, it comes to the fore.

Prioritize long-term success over short-term quality.

Calendar blocking. Creating blocks of time on your calendar is the perennial trick of time management: add three or four two-hour blocks scattered across your week to support more focused work. It’s not especially effective, but it does work to some extent and is quick to set up, which has made me a devoted user.

If you’re creative and consequent, and if you don’t fall into the trap of believing that being busy is being productive, you’ll find a way to get the workload under control.

Like a lot of folks, I have a brain that still helpfully reminds me of public errors I made decades ago, and they still bother me.

Since then, I’ve come to believe that environments that tolerate frequent exceptions are not only susceptible to bias but are also inefficient.

exceptions undermine one of the most powerful mechanisms for alignment: consistency.

The next time you’re about to dive into fixing a complicated one-off situation, consider taking a step back and documenting the problem but not trying to solve it.

make sure that your choices are being made on behalf of your team, not on your own behalf.

“How Do Individual Contributors Get Stuck?”

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.)

As managers looking to grow ourselves, we should really be pursuing scope: not enumerating people but taking responsibility for the success of increasingly important and complex facets of the organization and company.

There is a lot less competition for hard work.

in the long run our measure is not in what we say or how skillfully we say it, but in what we do, and the abacus tallying our actions is organizational culture.

Combine efforts on opportunity and membership, and you will find yourself solidly on the path to an inclusive organization.

Positive cultures center on recognizing impact, support, and development, which are all avenues that support widespread success.

“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”

both the stable eras and the transitions are great opportunities for growing yourself.

“If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat! Just get on.” —Sheryl Sandberg