A very American-Dream writing style, where one works in a reasonable job, gets proportionally rewarded, then tells others to do the same.
2 Organizations
In further defense of slack, I find that teams put spare capacity to great use by improving areas within their aegis, in both incremental and novel ways. As a bonus, they tend to do these improvements with minimal coordination costs, such that the local productivity doesn’t introduce drag on the surrounding system.
I’ve found it most fruitful to move scope between teams, preserving the teams themselves. If a team has significant slack, then incrementally move responsibility to them, at which point they’ll start locally optimizing their expanded workload.
All real- world systems have some degree of inherent self- healing properties: an overloaded database will slow down enough that someone fixes it, and overwhelmed employees will get slow at finishing work until someone finds a way to help.
The second most effective time thief that I’ve found is ad hoc interruptions: getting pinged on HipChat or Slack, taps on the shoulder, alerts from your on- call system, high- volume email lists, and so on.
train your team not to answer other forms of interruptions. This is remarkably uncomfortable because we want to be helpful humans, but it becomes necessary as the number of interruptions climbs higher.
There are a non- zero number of companies that do internal documentation well, but I’m less sure if there are a non- zero number of companies with more than 20 engineers that do this well. If you know any, please let me know so that I can pick their brains.
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.
The most valuable skill in this situation is learning to say no in a way that is appropriate to your company’s culture. That probably deserves its own chapter. There are probably some companies where saying no is culturally impossible, and in those places I guess you either learn to say your noes as yeses, or maybe you find a slightly easier environment to participate in.
Take a look at your calendar and write down your role in meetings.
This isn’t a one- time tool, but rather a great exercise to run once a year to identify things you could be delegating. This helps nurture an enduring organization, and also frees up time for you to continue growing into a larger role as well. You can even get a sense of how well you’re doing by taking a two- or three- week vacation and seeing what slips through the cracks.
3 Tools
Many effective leaders I’ve worked with have the uncanny knack for working on leveraged1 problems. In some problem domains, the product management skill set2 is extraordinarily effective for identifying useful problems, but systems thinking is the most universally useful tool kit I’ve found.
you should read Thinking in Systems: A Primer3 by Donella H. Meadows,
What are the composable blocks you could start building today that would compound into major product or technical leverage over time? I think of this category of work as finding ways to get the benefit at least twice. These are potentially tasks that initially don’t seem important enough to prioritize, but whose compounding value makes the work possible to prioritize.
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.
As an aside, I’ve found that most aspects of running a successful technology migration overlap with good solution validation! This is a very general skill that will repay many times over the time you invest in learning it.
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.
Before you’ve even finished reading a great diagnosis, you’ll often have identified several good candidate approaches. That’s the power of a well- defined problem statement, and why it’s an important foundational element for your strategy.
When you read good guiding policies, you think, “Ah, that’s really going to annoy Anna, Bill, and Claire,” because the approach takes a clear stance on competing goals.
When you apply your guiding policies to your diagnosis, you get your actions. Folks are often comfortable with hard decisions in the abstract, but struggle to translate policies into the specific steps to implement them. This is typically the easiest part to write, but publishing it and following through with it can be a significant test of your commitment.
People sometimes describe strategy as artful or sophisticated, but I’ve found that the hardest part of writing a good strategy is pretty mundane. You must be honest about the constraints that are making the challenge difficult, which almost always include people and organizational aspects that are uncomfortable to acknowledge. No extent of artistry can solve a problem that you’re unwilling to admit.
If strategies describe the harsh trade- offs necessary to overcome a particular challenge, then visions describe a future in which those trade- offs are no longer mutually exclusive. An effective vision helps folks think beyond the constraints of their local maxima, and lightly aligns progress without requiring tight centralized coordination.
Use present tense. This makes the writing impactful and concise, and conveys a sense of confidence about the future.
Often, visions are saturated with buzzwords, which turns readers off.
However, if your team is struggling to align with stakeholders, or if you’re struggling to lead a cohesive organization, these documents are exceptionally useful, fairly quick to write as you gain practice, and low risk (at worst, they get ignored).
This can be a very empowering moment because goals decouple the “what” from the “how,” but it can also be a confusing transition for everyone involved: writing clear goals takes a bit of practice.
You’ll know a goal is just a number when you read it and aren’t sure if it’s ambitious or whether it matters.
Although your baselines will often be about preserving a current property, you can also decide to accept some degradation before you want to trigger reprioritization. Perhaps you’re okay with costs increasing by 10 percent as long as your investment goals are accomplished. This kind of upfront clarity around trade- offs can be quite powerful.
In particular, I’ve found metrics to be an extremely effective way to lead change with little or no organizational authority, and I wanted to write up how I’ve seen that work.
At both Stripe and Uber, I’ve had the opportunity to manage infrastructure costs. (Let me insert a plug for Ryan Lopopolo’s amazing blog post on “Effectively Using AWS Reserved Instances.” 19) Folks who haven’t thought about this problem often default to viewing it as boring, but I’ve found that as you dig into it, it’s rich soil for learning about leading organizational change.
Infrastructure cost is a great example of a baseline metric.
It’s one thing for a team to know that they’re spending $ 100,000 a month, and it’s something entirely different for them to know that they’re spending $ 100,000 a month and that their team spends the second- highest amount out of 47 teams. Benchmarking is particularly powerful because it automatically adapts to changes in behavior.
What I’ve found effective is to send push notifications, typically email, to teams whose metric has changed recently, both in terms of absolute change and in terms of their benchmarked performance against their cohort.
What’s so powerful about nudges is that simply letting folks know their behavior has changed will typically stir them to action, and it doesn’t require any sort of organizational authority to do so. (For more on this topic, take a look at Nudge by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein.)
The approach is also effective because it tries to minimize top- down orchestration in favor of providing information to encourage teams themselves to adjust priorities.
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.
Don’t start with the easiest migrations, which can lead to a false sense of security.
If you leave one migration partially finished, people will be exceedingly suspicious of participating in the next.
Instead of falling behind by default, you’re now making progress by default.
Management is a profession where karma always comes due, and you’ll be better off addressing the underlying issue than continuing to work around it.
If you’re targeting more than eight engineers per manager, then it’s worth reflecting on why you believe your managers can support a significantly higher load than industry average: Are they exceptionally experienced? Are your expectations lower than typical?
Managers tend to have a strong sense of the business’s needs, and that gives them the superpower of finding the intersection of your interests and the business’s priorities.
4 Approaches
As a new manager, I found it useful to start each performance review season by rereading! Which also means it’s an excellent time to reread Camille Fournier’s “How Do Individual Contributors Get Stuck?” 10 Over time, I found myself wanting a manager- centric version, and eventually that desire solidified into the following list.
(I’d like to add useful to things, but as best I can tell, my team’s software was unilaterally thrown away, so that’s hard to justify.)
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.
5 Culture
Jason Wong’s “Building a First Team Mindset” 6 is an excellent read on this theme if you’re looking for more!
6 Careers
Luck plays such an extraordinary role in each individual’s career progression that sometimes the entire concept of career planning seems dubious.
More than saying that you should specifically try these four approaches (but you should!), the key point is to keep trying new and different approaches that improve your chance of finding signal from different candidates.
When I recall the fortunately rare situations when I’ve been interviewed by someone who was both rude and unprepared, I still remember the unprepared part first and the rude part second.
I first encountered this idea reading Rands’s “Wanted” article, 4 and he does an excellent job of covering it there. The remarkable thing is how few companies and teams do this intentionally: in my last interviewing process, three of the companies I spoke with expressed interest exceptionally well, and those three companies ended up being the ones I engaged with seriously.
Both of these mechanisms are tricky because candidates are often exhausted and the power dynamics of interviewing work against honest feedback.
(However, I also think we tend to over- filter on qualities that don’t matter too much! Being respectful of the candidate’s time is, in my opinion, the most important thing to optimize for.)
Spend time. Have the people the candidate would work with spend time with them.
Clearly define the role. Tell the candidate about what they’d be doing, being both very honest and a bit optimistic.
Certainty. You want to be as confident as possible that the candidate will be a success in your company.
A good ladder allows individuals to accurately self- access; these ladders are self- contained and short. A bad ladder is ambiguous and requires deep knowledge of precedent to apply correctly. If there is one component of performance management that you’re going to invest into doing well, make it the ladders: everything else builds on this foundation.
Compare against the ladder, not against others. Comparing folks against each other tends to introduce false equivalencies without adding much clarity. Focus on the ladder instead.
If you’re looking for more, Laszlo Bock’s Work Rules! 13 is a good read.
7 Appendix
Your move from receiving asks from stakeholders to deeply understanding what is motivating those asks.