An Elegant Puzzle Quotes

“The fact that something stops working at significantly increased scale is a sign that it was designed appropriately to the previous constraints rather than being over-designed.23”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“Where to stash your organizational risk? Lately, I’m increasingly hearing folks reference the idea of organizational debt. This is the organizational sibling of technical debt, and it represents things like biased interview processes and inequitable compensation mechanisms. These are systemic problems that are preventing your organization from reaching its potential. Like technical debt, these risks linger because they are never the most pressing problem. Until that one fateful moment when they are. Within organizational debt, there is a volatile subset most likely to come abruptly due, and I call that subset organizational risk. Some good examples might be a toxic team culture, a toilsome fire drill, or a struggling leader. These problems bubble up from your peers, skip-level one-on-ones,16 and organizational health surveys. If you care and are listening, these are hard to miss. But they are slow to fix. And, oh, do they accumulate! The larger and older your organization is, the more you’ll find perched on your capable shoulders. How you respond to this is, in my opinion, the core challenge of leading a large organization. How do you continue to remain emotionally engaged with the challenges faced by individuals you’re responsible to help, when their problem is low in your problems queue? In that moment, do you shrug off the responsibility, either by changing roles or picking powerlessness? Hide in indifference? Become so hard on yourself that you collapse inward? I’ve tried all of these! They weren’t very satisfying. What I’ve found most successful is to identify a few areas to improve, ensure you’re making progress on those, and give yourself permission to do the rest poorly. Work with your manager to write this up as an explicit plan and agree on what reasonable progress looks like. These issues are still stored with your other bags of risk and responsibility, but you’ve agreed on expectations. Now you have a set of organizational risks that you’re pretty confident will get fixed, and then you have all the others: known problems, likely to go sideways, that you don’t believe you’re able to address quickly. What do you do about those? I like to keep them close. Typically, my organizational philosophy is to stabilize team-by-team and organization-by-organization. Ensuring any given area is well on the path to health before moving my focus. I try not to push risks onto teams that are functioning well. You do need to delegate some risks, but generally I think it’s best to only delegate solvable risk. If something simply isn’t likely to go well, I think it’s best to hold the bag yourself. You may be the best suited to manage the risk, but you’re almost certainly the best positioned to take responsibility. As an organizational leader, you’ll always have a portfolio of risk, and you’ll always be doing very badly at some things that are important to you. That’s not only okay, it’s unavoidable.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“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.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“When I started managing, my leadership philosophy was simple: The Golden Rule6 makes a lot of sense. Give everyone an explicit area of ownership that they are responsible for. Reward and status should derive from finishing high-quality work. Lead from the front, and never ask anyone to do something you wouldn’t.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“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. Commit to refreshing the policy in a month, and batch all exceptions requests until then. Merge the escalations and your current policy into a new revision. This will save your time, build teams’ trust in the system, and move you from working the exceptions to working the policy.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“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.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“Organizations spending significant time on exceptions are experiencing exception debt. The escape is to stop working the exceptions, and instead work the policy.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“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.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“The criteria I use to evaluate if a team’s sprint works well: Team knows what they should be working on. Team knows why their work is valuable. Team can determine if their work is complete. Team knows how to figure out what to work on next. Stakeholders can learn what the team is working on. Stakeholders can learn what the team plans to work on next.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“you only get value from projects when they finish: to make progress, above all else, you must ensure that some of your projects finish.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“I believe that, at quickly growing companies, there are two managerial skills that have a disproportionate impact on your organization’s success: making technical migrations cheap, and running clean reorganizations.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“The first phase of a planning cycle is exploring the different problems that you could pick to solve. It’s surprisingly common to skip this phase, but that, unsurprisingly, leads to inertia-driven local optimization. Taking the time to evaluate which problem to solve is one of the best predictors I’ve found of a team’s long-term performance.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“I can’t stress enough that these fixes are slow. This is because systems accumulate months or years of static, and you have to drain that all away. Conversely, the same properties that make these fixes slow to fix make them extremely durable once in effect!”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“Prefer experimentation over analysis. It’s far more reliable to get good at cheap validation than it is to get great at consistently picking the right solution. Even if you’re brilliant, you are almost always missing essential information when you begin designing. Analysis can often uncover missing information, but it depends on knowing where to look, whereas experimentation allows you to find problems that you didn’t anticipate.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“One of the observations from systems thinking16 is that, though humans are prone to interpreting events as causal, often problems are better described in terms of a series of stockpiles that grow and shrink based on incoming and outgoing flows. The Dust Bowl17 wasn’t caused by one farmer or one year of overfarming, but by years of systemic abuse. 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.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“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. Later, as your new heroes finish martyring themselves on burnout, you’re left with three exceptionally challenging problems: You’ve bred a cadre of dissatisfied and burned-out heroes. You and your heroes have alienated everyone else. Your project is still totally screwed. This is a recurring pattern that many growing companies fall into, and it also happens to projects within larger companies. Anywhere you find managerial desperation and a hardworking team, “Do It Harder” may be visiting.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“Coffee chats, perhaps randomly assigned by Donut,4 get folks from different teams interacting when they don’t need something from each other.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“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. This is where advancing your career can veer away from a zero-sum competition to have the largest team and evolve into a virtuous cycle of empowering the organization and taking on more responsibility. There is a lot less competition for hard work.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“Effective managers tend to become the glue in their team, filling any gaps. Sometimes that means doing things you don’t really want to do, in order to set a good example.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“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.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“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.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“Titles are arbitrary social constructs that only make sense in the context they’re given. Titles don’t translate across companies meaningfully, and they’re a deeply flawed way to judge yourself or others. Don’t let them become your goal.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“It’s easy to get frustrated with your manager when they put you in bad situations, forget to tell you something important, or commit your team to something without consulting you, but they almost certainly did it with the best of intentions. To have a good relationship with your manager, you have to give them room to make mistakes.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“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.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“All slow-growth environments used to be high-growth environments, which means they were once run by someone who was a sufficiently effective executor to evolve them into a slow-growth environment. Consequently there tends to be less iterative improvement available than you’d expect. 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.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“The most confusing places to start are midsize, rapidly growing companies. That’s because parts of the company are growing quickly, with an emphasis on execution, and other parts have largely stabilized, with ideas becoming the more valued currency. Long bones have growth plates at their ends, which is where the growth happens, and the middle doesn’t grow. This is a pretty apt metaphor for rapidly growing companies, and a useful mental model when trying to understand why your behaviors might not be resonating in a new role.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“I believe that almost every internal problem can be traced back to a missing or poor relationship, and that with great relationships it is possible to come together and solve almost anything.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“The fixed cost of creating and maintaining a policy is high enough that I generally don’t recommend writing policies that do little to constrain behavior. In fact, that’s a useful definition of bad policy. In such cases, I instead recommend writing norms, which provide nonbinding recommendations. Because they’re nonbinding, they don’t require escalations to address ambiguities or edge cases.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“organizations survive by adapting to the dynamic circumstances they live in. An organization stubbornly insisting on its established routines is a company pacing a path whose grooves lead to failure.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“Delegate working “in the system.” Wherever you’re working “in the system,”44 design a path that will enable someone else to take on that work. It might be that this plan will take a year to come together, and that’s fine, but what’s not all right is if it’s going to take a year and you haven’t even started.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management