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.

By tracking your eras and transitions, you can avoid lingering in any era beyond the point when you’re developing new masteries. This will allow you to continue your personal growth even if you’re working in what some would describe as a boring, mature company. The same advice applies if you’re within a quickly growing company or startup: don’t tre

There is a lot less competition for hard work.

Typically, my organizational philosophy is to stabilize team-by-team and organization-by-organization. Ensuring any given area is well on the path to health before moving my focus. I try not to push risks onto teams that are functioning well. You do need to delegate some risks, but generally I think it’s best to only delegate solvable risk. If some

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take an hour and write up as many goals as you can for what you’d like to accomplish in the next one to five years. Then prioritize the list, pick a few that you’d like to focus on for the next three to six months, and share it with your manager at your next one-on-one.

A prototypical head of engineering will be skilled at organizational design, process design, business strategy, recruiting, mentoring, coaching, public speaking, and written communication. They’ll also have a broad personal network and a broad foundation from product engineering to infrastructure engineering. That’s not even a particularly complete

To increase the number of folks leading this kind of project, I’ve iterated into a structured process that has worked quite well:

you only get value from projects when they finish: to make progress, above all else, you must ensure that some of your projects finish.