In Work on what matters, I wrote about Hunter Walk’s idea of snacking: doing work that is easy to complete but low impact. The best story of my own snacking behaviors comes from my time at Stripe. I was focused on revamping the engineering organization’s approach to operating reliable software, and decided that it might also make sense to start an internal book club. It was, dear reader, not the right time to start a book club. Once you start looking for this behavior, it is everywhere, i...| lethain.com
Uber’s best known corporate value is probably Super Pumped, which, in addition to being a one-time company value, is also the title of Mike Isaac’s account of Uber and the subsequent television show. However, for me personally, the value I remember most is Let Builders Build. Working in Uber’s infrastructure engineering organization, I once chatted with a product engineering manager who wanted to continue rolling out a new feature that was hammering the production database. I was concer...| lethain.com
Most growth companies are starved for experienced leadership. As they expand, continued growth builds up pressure on their existing leadership. This gets quite stressful! The rare executive manages to build an effective organization solely by investing in their existing team, but most supplement their organization with some external hires to maintain a balance of folks who’ve seen it before and folks who’re actively learning their role.| lethain.com
A surprising number of strategies are doomed from inception because their authors get attached to one particular approach without considering alternatives that would work better for their current circumstances. This happens when engineers want to pick tools solely because they are trending, and when executives insist on adopting the tech stack from their prior organization where they felt comfortable. Exploration is the antidote to early anchoring, forcing you to consider the problem widely b...| lethain.com
In Jim Collins’ Great by Choice, he develops the concept of Fire Bullets, Then Cannonballs. His premise is that you should cheaply test new ideas before fully committing to them. Your organization can only afford firing a small number of cannonballs, but it can bankroll far more bullets. Why not use bullets to derisk your cannonballs’ trajectories? This chapter presents a series of concrete techniques that I have personally used to effectively refine strategies before reaching the cannonb...| lethain.com
Even if you believe that strategy is generally useful, it is difficult to decide that today’s the day to start writing engineering strategy. When you do start writing strategy, it’s easy write so much strategy that your organization is overwhelmed and ignores your strategy rather than investing time into understanding it. Fortunately, these are universal problems, and there are a handful of useful mental models to avoid both extremes. This chapter covers:| lethain.com
When I worked at Yahoo!, our team needed another engineering manager. We didn’t run a hiring process, or even do interviews. Instead, our Director brought on a colleague he’d worked with before. That new manager soon decided he needed a tech lead on his team. We didn’t run a hiring process, do interviews, or consider candidates on the existing team. Instead, our new manager brought over one of his previous colleagues. A third previous colleague reached out to our Director, and without a...| lethain.com