Summary #

A review of my perception of “An Elegant Puzzle” by Will Larson. Considers where and how I might apply its learnings, and whether I feel I could get suitable use from the book at this present time.

Where Could I Use It? #

The book covers a number of different areas roughly aligned around growing and supporting your team, selling your vision for the teams work, planning and collaborating with others when executing on that vision.

Management: protecting and advancing the team #

• Engineering pain points once fundamentals are in place
• How do we grow seniority evenly across the team
• Handling disagreements on velocity and prioritisation
• Reducing burnout by resetting broken systems rather than working harder
• Tracking career transitions and plateaus

Strategy: planning and building support #

• Setting good strategies for the team
• Making strategy and vision easy to understand and lightweight
• Presenting to senior leadership
• How to explain team constraints to stakeholders outside team
• Planning rewrites and migrations
• Identifying bottlenecks through systems thinking
• Building relationships with stakeholders

Execution: reducing friction and improving outcomes #

• Running good migrations and making them cheap
• Ways to introduce processes that others might adopt
• Using systems thinking to manage change at the team and individual level

Alternatives #

The book appears to be a collection of individual writings by the author, with the original draft forms of the content being published on Will Larson’s blog:

• https://lethain.com/systems-thinking/
• https://lethain.com/productivity-in-the-age-of-hypergrowth/
  • systems survive one magnitude of growth, then need to be reimplemented
  • dealing with a never-ending stream of migrations
  • what do when our systems are slowing us down, but we have too many migrations
• https://lethain.com/migrations/
  • tips for running good migrations and making them successful
    • de-risk, enable, finish
    • purpose-built monitoring
    • shadowing and reverse shadowing traffic
    • migrations always take longer than planned due to the long tail being a lot more complicated
  • good vs bad migrations - the productivity killer is when you have poor migrations following rewrites
  • why migrations matter
    • usually the only available avenue to make meaningful process on technical debt
    • making technical migrations cheap
• https://lethain.com/presenting-to-executives/
  • presenting to senior leadership
• https://lethain.com/strategies-visions/
  • guides to writing durable visions and easy to understand, lightweight strategies
• https://lethain.com/model-document-share/
  • approach to introducing processes that others might adopt
• https://lethain.com/saying-no/
  • explaining team constraints to people outside the team
  • handling disagreements on velocity and prioritisation
• https://lethain.com/first-team/
  • building relationships with stakeholders and similar grades
• https://lethain.com/doing-it-harder-and-hero-programming/
  • working harder as a solution just leads to burnout
  • resetting broken systems rather than working harder
• https://lethain.com/roles-over-rocket-ships/
  • why tenure is a weak predictor of personal growth
  • working at a high-growth company doesn’t you mean you get to grow quickly
  • tracking career transitions and plateaus
• https://lethain.com/hiring-funnel/
  • identifying bottlenecks via systems thinking

Conclusion #

There are a number of areas of interest, not all are within the responsibilities of my current role however.

• Intended more for management rather than staff engineer
• Being able to consider management’s viewpoints in daily operations would be useful
• Potentially upcoming architecture decisions to be made that would benefit from the writings on strategy and execution
• Intended as a reference book, rather than a “reading” book
  • implies longer term value as a resource to refer back to for specific questions
• Book is £20 so a reasonable calculated risk
• Seems “fashionable” in the software engineering space, so the work library would probably accept the book if I didn’t find enough value to warrant keeping it

Outcome: Purchase later (hesitantly optimistic)