An Elegant Puzzle Quotes

“Decouple participation from productivity. As you grow more senior, you’ll be invited to more meetings, and many of those meetings will come with significant status. Attending those meetings can make you feel powerful, but you have to keep perspective about whether you’re accomplishing much by attending. Sometimes, being able to convey important context to your team is super valuable, and in those cases you should keep attending, but don’t fall into the trap of assuming that attendance is valuable.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“Stop doing things. When you’re quite underwater, a surprisingly underutilized technique is to stop doing things. If you drop things in an unstructured way, this goes very poorly, but done with structure this works every time. Identify some critical work that you won’t do, recategorize that newly unstaffed work as organizational risk,42 and then alert your team and management chain that you won’t be doing it. This last bit is essential: it’s fine to drop things, but it’s quite bad to silently drop them.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“Prioritize long-term success over short-term quality. As your scope increases, the important work that you’re responsible for may simply not be possible to finish. Worse, the work that you believe is most important, perhaps high-quality one-on-ones, is often competing with work that’s essential to long-term success, like hiring for a critical role. Ultimately, you have to prioritize long-term success, even if it’s personally unrewarding to do so in the short term. It’s not that I like this approach, it’s that nothing else works.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“A positive freedom is the freedom to do something, for example the freedom to pick a programming language you prefer. A negative freedom is the freedom from things happening to you, for example the freedom not to be obligated to support additional programming languages, even if others would greatly prefer them.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“The three rules for speaking with the media: Answer the question you want to be asked. If someone asks a very difficult or challenging question, reframe it into one that you’re comfortable answering. Don’t accept a question’s implicit framing, but instead take the opportunity to frame it yourself. Don’t Think of An Elephant by George Lakoff 32 is a phenomenal, compact guide to framing issues. Stay positive. Negative stories can be very compelling. They are quite risky, too! As an interviewee, find a positive framing and stick to it. This is especially true when it comes to competitors and controversy. Speak in threes. Narrow your message down to three concise points, make them your refrain, and continue to refer back to your three speaking points.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“Controls are the mechanisms that you use to align with other leaders you work with, and they can range from defining metrics to sprint planning (although I wouldn’t recommend the latter). There is no universal set of controls—depending on the size of team and your relationships with its leaders, you’ll want to mix and match—but the controls structure itself is universally applicable. Some of the most common controls that I’ve seen and used: Metrics26 align on outcomes while leaving flexibility around how the outcomes are achieved. Visions27 ensure that you agree on long-term direction while preserving short-term flexibility. Strategies28 confirm you have a shared understanding of the current constraints and how to address them. Organization design allows you to coordinate the evolution of a wider organization within the context of sub-organizations. Head count and transfers are the ultimate form of prioritization, and a good forum for validating how organizational priorities align across individual teams. Roadmaps align on problem selection and solution validation. Performance reviews coordinate culture and recognition. Etc. There are an infinite number of other possibilities, many of which are specific to your company’s particular meetings and forums. Start with this list, but don’t stick to it!”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“There are two best kinds of reorganizations: The one that solves a structural problem. The one that you don’t do. There is only one worst kind of reorg: the one you do because you’re avoiding a people management issue.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“Lore tells us that Googlers have a phrase, “running to stand still,” to describe a team whose entire capacity is consumed in upgrading dependencies and patterns, such that the group can’t make forward progress on the product/system they own.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“Migrations matter because they are usually the only available avenue to make meaningful progress on technical debt.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“Migrations are both essential and frustratingly frequent as your codebase ages and your business grows: most tools and processes only support about one order of magnitude of growth22 before becoming ineffective, so rapid growth makes migrations a way of life. This isn’t because you have bad processes or poor tools—quite the opposite. 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”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“There are two particularly interesting kinds of goals: investments and baselines. Investments describe a future state that you want to reach, and baselines describe aspects of the present that you want to preserve.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“The two tests of an effective goal are whether someone who doesn’t know much about an area can get a feel for a goal’s degree of difficulty, and whether afterward they can evaluate if it was successfully achieved. If you define all four aspects, typically your goal will fulfill both criteria.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“Good goals are a composition of four specific kinds of numbers: A target states where you want to reach. A baseline identifies where you are today. A trend describes the current velocity. A time frame sets bounds for the change.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

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

“Product management is an iterative elimination tournament, with each round consisting of problem discovery, problem selection, and solution validation.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“The best changes often go unnoticed, moving from one moment of stability to another, with teams and organizations feeling stable at every step. The key tools for leading efficient change are systems thinking, metrics, and vision. When the steps of change are too wide, teams get destabilized, and gaps open within them. In those moments, managers create stability by becoming glue.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“Succession planning is thinking through how the organization would function without you, documenting those gaps, and starting to fill them in. It’s awkward enough to talk about that it doesn’t get much discussion, but it’s a foundational skill for building an enduring organization.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“managing rapid growth is more along the lines of stacking small wins than identifying silver bullets.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

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

“In my opinion, probably the most important opportunity is designing your software to be flexible. I’ve described this as “fail open and layer policy”; the best system rewrite is the one that didn’t happen, and if you can avoid baking in arbitrary policy decisions that will change frequently over time, then you are much more likely to be able to keep using a system for the long term.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

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

“When I started at Uber, we were almost 1,000 employees and were doubling the headcount every six months. An old-timer summarized their experience as: “We’re growing so quickly that every six months we’re a new company.” A bystander quickly added a corollary: “Which means our process is always six months behind our head count.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

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

“Teams take a long time to gel. When a group has been working together for a few years, they understand each other and know how to set each other up for success in a truly remarkable way. Shifting individuals across teams can reset the clock on gelling, especially for teams in the early stages of gelling, and when there are significant differences in team culture. That’s not to say that you want teams to never change—that leads to stagnation—but perhaps preserving a team’s gelled state requires restrained growth.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

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

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

“A team is innovating when their technical debt is sustainably low, morale is high, and the majority of work is satisfying new user needs.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“Teams should be six to eight during steady state. To create a new team, grow an existing team to eight to ten, and then bud into two teams of four or five. Never create empty teams. Never leave managers supporting more than eight individuals.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

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

“There’s a saying that people don’t leave companies, they leave managers. Management is a key part of any organization, yet the discipline is often self-taught and unstructured. Getting to good solutions for complex management challenges can make the difference between fulfillment and frustration for teams, and, ultimately, between the success or failure of companies.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management