Tactically, ensure that the work your team is doing is valued: the quickest path out of innovation is to be viewed as a team that builds science projects,

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As I’ve become more experienced, my appreciation for management, and engineering management in particular, has grown, and I’ve come to view the field as a series of elegant, rewarding, and important puzzles. This book is a collection of those puzzles, which I’ve had the good fortune to struggle with and learn from. It starts with the most important

Good goals are a composition of four specific kinds of numbers: A target states where you want to reach. A baseline identifies where you are today. A trend describes the current velocity. A time frame sets bounds for the change.

Figure 3.8 The expected and actual experience of presenting to executives. My general approach to presenting to senior leaders is: Tie topic to business value. One or two sentences to answer the question “Why should anyone care?” Establish historical narrative. Two to four sentences to help folks understand how things are going, how we got here, an

Write up a plan to close all of the easy gaps and one or two of the riskiest gaps. Add it to your personal goals, and then, congrats, you’ve completed a round of succession planning!

you can always find an opportunity to increase your scope and learning, even in a company that doesn’t have room for more directors or vice presidents.

A team is repaying debt when they’re able to start paying down technical debt, and are beginning to benefit from the debt repayment snowball: each piece of debt you repay leads to more time to repay more debt.

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.