An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

by Will Larson

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.

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.

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.

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.

The first step to setting direction is to cast the widest possible net for ideas. Talk to folks at your company who have worked at different kinds of companies, and ask what those companies did really well.

A 90-day plan. The applicant writes a 90-day plan of how they’d transition into the role, and what they would focus on. They emphasize specific tactics, time management, and where they’d put their attention.

Running a humane interview process

A good interview experience starts with being kind to your candidate.

Feedback loops

The three biggest sources of candidates are referrals from your existing team, inbound applicants who apply on your jobs page, and sourced candidates whom you proactively bring into your funnel.

The relationship between Performance designation and quantity of designations.