An Elegant Puzzle Quotes

“Something that is somewhat ignored a bit here is how to handle urgent project requests when you’re already underwater with your existing work and maintenance. The most valuable skill in this situation is learning to say no in a way that is appropriate to your company’s culture.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

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

“Organizational design gets the right people in the right places, empowers them to make decisions, and then holds them accountable for their results. Maintained consistently and changed sparingly, nothing else will help you scale more.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“Take a look at your calendar and write down your role in meetings. This goes for explicit roles, like owning a meeting’s agenda, and also for more nuanced roles, like being the first person to champion others’ ideas, or the person who is diplomatic enough to raise difficult concerns. Take a second pass on your calendar for non-meeting stuff, like interviewing and closing candidates. Look back over the past six months for recurring processes, like roadmap planning, performance calibrations, or head count decisions, and document your role17 in each of those processes. For each of the individuals you support, in which areas are your skills and actions most complementary to theirs? How do you help them? What do they rely on you for? Maybe it’s authorization, advice navigating the organization, or experience in the technical domain. Audit inbound chats and emails for requests and questions coming your way. If you keep a to-do list, look at the categories of the work you’ve completed over the past six months, as well as the stuff you’ve been wanting to do but keep putting off. Think through the external relationships that have been important for you in your current role. What kinds of folks have been important, and who are the strategic partners that someone needs to know?”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

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

“Projects fail all the time, people screw up all the time. Usually it’s by failing to acknowledge missteps that we exacerbate them.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“freedom” is neither inherently good nor inherently just, and descends into the murky gray that already embroils everything else in our lives. Each positive freedom we enforce strips away a negative freedom, and each negative freedom we guarantee eliminates a corresponding positive freedom. This sad state of affairs is often referred to as the Paradox of Positive Liberty.11”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“As a leader, you can’t run from problems; engage ’em head-on.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“I believe that management, at its core, is an ethical profession.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“that’s both an opportunity and an obligation for managers, and saying no in that room with my manager and CTO was,”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“escalations will only be used as inputs for updated policy, not handled in a one-off fashion.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“Policy success is directly dependent on how we handle requests for exception.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“consistency requires no little bravery.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“Ensure that remote engineers remain an essential, well-supported cohort of the company.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“Work the policy, not the exceptions.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“environments that tolerate frequent exceptions are not only susceptible to bias but are also inefficient.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“consistency is a precondition of fairness.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“For engineering managers, challenges emerge unexpected from a hundred small decisions, with few rules and no promises.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“For engineering managers, challenges emerge unexpected from a hundred small decisions, with few rules and no”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“Organizational design gets the right people in the right places, empowers them to make decisions, and then holds them accountable for their results.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“A few years back, one of the leaders I worked with told me, "With the right people, any process works, and with the wrong people, no process works.".

I've found this to be pretty accurate.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“Small teams (fewer than four members) are not teams I’ve sponsored quite a few teams of one or two people, and each time I’ve regretted it. To repeat: I have regretted it every single time. 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. To reason about a small team’s delivery, you’ll have to know about each on-call shift, vacation, and interruption. They are also fragile, with one departure easily moving them from innovation back into toiling to maintain technical debt.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“With the right people, any process works, and with the wrong people, no process works.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“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