An Elegant Puzzle , by Will Larson, on the community book club.

It is the best book I ever read about engineering management, and the reason comes down to one thing: systems thinking. This is a wildly overused term, but Will gives a very precise definition for it.

Systems are combinations of stocks and flows :

🧱 Stocks — are accumulations of resources.

🔀 Flows — are streams that make stocks increase ( inflows ) or decrease ( outflows ).

This looks extremely simple and, in fact, through the use of diagrams, it turns systems into equally simple boxes and arrows.

Simple, though, doesn’t mean vague — on the contrary, stocks and flows are precise ideas that, applied well, can model infinitely sophisticated situations.

One of the examples provided is about DORA metrics. The four metrics are flows that impact their respective stocks , and together model the software delivery process as a clear, predictable system (see picture).

a delivery process mapped into stocks and flows

Now, thinking at your dev process as a system is still intuitive, or at least it should be, to managers and engineers who have been in the industry for more than a few years.

The main virtue of An Elegant Puzzle, though, is that it applies this line of thinking to everything .

It addresses otherwise nebulous themes like team organization, culture, hiring, or hypergrowth, by uncovering their inner logic and creating mini frameworks that always feel grounded and actionable.

This is extraordinarily useful. In Will’s own words 👇

Once you start thinking about systems, you’ll find it’s hard to stop. Pretty much any difficult problem is worth trying to represent as a system, and even without numbers plugged in I find them powerful thinking aids.

AI bottlenecks, translating impact, and systems thinking 💡