An Elegant Puzzle: Systems Of Engineering Management [MOBI]

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E-Book Overview

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 the good solutions of complex management challenges can make the difference between fulfillment and frustration for teams, and, ultimately, the success or failure of companies. Will Larson's An Elegant Puzzle orients around the particular challenges of engineering management--from sizing teams to technical debt to succession planning--and provides a path to the good solutions. Drawing from his experience at Digg, Uber, and Stripe, Will Larson has developed a thoughtful approach to engineering management that leaders of all levels at companies of all sizes can apply. An Elegant Puzzle balances structured principles and human-centric thinking to help any leader create more effective and rewarding organizations for engineers to thrive in.

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E-Book Information

• Year: 2,019

• Pages: 289

• Language: English

• Topic: 6

• Asin: B07QYCHJ7V

• Org File Size: 2,315,706

• Extension: mobi

• Toc: Preface Acknowledgments 1 Introduction 2 Organizations 2.1 Sizing teams 2.2 Staying on the path to high-performing teams 2.2.1 Four states of a team 2.2.2 System fixes and tactical support 2.2.3 Consolidate your efforts 2.2.4 Durable excellence 2.3 A case against top-down global optimization 2.3.1 Team first 2.3.2 Fixed costs 2.3.3 Slack 2.3.4 Shift scope; rotate 2.4 Productivity in the age of hypergrowth 2.4.1 More engineers, more problems 2.4.2 Systems survive one magnitude of growth 2.4.3 Ways to manage entropy 2.4.4 Closing thoughts 2.5 Where to stash your organizational risk? 2.6 Succession planning 2.6.1 What do you do? 2.6.2 Close the gaps 3 Tools 3.1 Introduction to systems thinking 3.1.1 Stocks and flows 3.1.2 Developer velocity 3.1.3 Model away 3.2 Product management: exploration, selection, validation 3.2.1 Problem discovery 3.2.2 Problem selection 3.2.3 Solution validation 3.3 Visions and strategies 3.3.1 Strategies and visions 3.3.2 Strategy 3.3.3 Vision 3.4 Metrics and baselines 3.5 Guiding broad organizational change with metrics 3.6 Migrations: the sole scalable fix to tech debt 3.6.1 Why migrations matter 3.6.2 Running good migrations 3.7 Running an engineering reorg 3.7.1 Is a reorg the right tool? 3.7.2 Project head count a year out 3.7.3 Manager-to-engineer ratio 3.7.4 Defining teams and groups 3.7.5 Staffing the teams and groups 3.7.6 Commit to moving forward 3.7.7 Roll out the change 3.8 Identify your controls 3.9 Career narratives 3.9.1 Artificial competition 3.9.2 Translating goals 3.10 The briefest of media trainings 3.11 Model, document, and share 3.11.1 How it works 3.11.2 Where it works 3.12 Scaling consistency: designing centralized decision-making groups 3.12.1 Positive and negative freedoms 3.12.2 Group design 3.12.3 Failure modes 3.13 Presenting to senior leadership 3.14 Time management 3.15 Communities of learning 4 Approaches 4.1 Work the policy, not the exceptions 4.1.1 Good policy is opinionated 4.1.2 Exception debt 4.1.3 Work the policy 4.2 Saying no 4.2.1 Constraints 4.2.2 V