PDF Summary:The Engineering Executive's Primer, by Will Larson

As an engineering executive, developing key leadership skills is crucial for guiding your team and organization to success. In The Engineering Executive's Primer, Will Larson provides a roadmap for building effective relationships across the company, establishing transparent processes and cultural values, crafting an overarching engineering strategy, and empowering both individual contributors and managers.

Larson shares insights on navigating tricky scenarios, from handling the transition to a leadership role and resolving conflicts, to balancing policies and innovation, onboarding talent, defining metrics, and managing priorities without burning out. With pragmatic advice grounded in real-world experience, this guide equips you with essential tools for excelling as an engineering leader.

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• Develop a habit of weekly self-reviews to assess the health of your ongoing activities. At the end of each week, take 30 minutes to reflect on what went well, what didn't, and why. Use this time to adjust your strategies, set new goals, or identify areas where you need more support or resources. This practice can help you stay on track and maintain a healthy balance between different aspects of your life.
• Implement a feedback mechanism for any services you provide, even if it's informal like a hobbyist selling crafts online. Ask customers to rate their experience regarding the speed of service and any issues encountered. Use this data to make adjustments, ensuring a smoother experience for future transactions.
• Develop a habit of conducting weekly personal 'operations meetings' with yourself. During these meetings, review your tracked metrics from the spreadsheet, set targets for improvement, and brainstorm strategies to reduce unit costs. For example, if you notice your cost per meal is high, you might plan to cook in bulk or look for discounts at local stores.
• Start a blog or social media page to share your hobbies or side projects and invite engagement through comments and shares. Use the analytics tools provided by these platforms to monitor which posts convert to more followers or interactions, giving you a practical understanding of user-centric metrics in a real-world context.
• Experiment with different productivity methods each month and measure the results. For instance, one month you could try the Pomodoro Technique, which involves working in focused bursts with short breaks in between, and the next month you could experiment with time-blocking, where you schedule specific blocks of time for different tasks. Keep a journal of your productivity levels and satisfaction with the work completed to determine which method works best for you.
• Engage with a friend or family member in a friendly optimization challenge. Each of you can choose an area to optimize and set a metric to track, such as saving money, reducing screen time, or increasing physical activity. Check in with each other weekly to share progress and discuss strategies. This social accountability can boost motivation and provide new insights into effective ways to reach your goals.
• Use a free online tool like Toggl to track how much time you spend on different tasks throughout your workday. By categorizing your activities and timing them, you'll get a clear picture of where your time goes, which can reveal insights into your productivity patterns and help you make informed adjustments to your routine.
• Start a conversation with friends or family about a piece of technology or infrastructure that has significantly changed their lives. Ask them to describe the impact and discuss the engineering principles that might be behind it. For instance, discuss the role of engineering in smartphones and how they have revolutionized communication and access to information.
• Start a peer brainstorming group where members share their "impossible" ideas and collectively brainstorm ways to make them actionable. Meet with a small group of friends or colleagues every two weeks to discuss ideas that each person thinks are impossible. Use the collective creativity of the group to find practical steps to advance these ideas, and hold each other accountable for taking action between meetings.

Involve Stakeholders Appropriately in the Measurement Process

In addition to measuring how effective your team is for yourself, you will inevitably encounter demands from numerous stakeholders, such as the chief executive officer, the board, and your various peers, for specific measurements. To navigate these demands effectively, Larson advises understanding each stakeholder's viewpoint and aligning with them on measures that are both easy to track and truly represent Engineering's success. To measure for your company's CEO, you must select metrics that they can connect to the organization's overall business strategy—these metrics are likely to come from either operations or planning measures. The Finance department needs metrics to support tracking both the number of personnel and vendor costs against the agreed budgeting allocations, and also for evaluating whether Engineering labor can be capitalized on the official P&L or must be directly expensed instead.

Peers are typically subdivided into groups that focus on strategy and operational groups. Strategic peer organizations (Product, Design, Sales, etc.) are evaluated through their direct contribution to shared business goals like increasing revenue or customer growth, and they align easily with a common set of planning-oriented metrics. Tactical peer organizations, like Customer Success or Legal, however, are assessed based on their internal processes—for example, Customer Success is often measured by how quickly they respond to customer tickets and by customer satisfaction. Tactical peers tend to demand that Engineering is measured by their team's own internal operational metrics, such as ticket resolution time for Engineering-related customer or legal tickets, since they aren't incentivized to aim for goals that may harm their internal metrics. Whether strategic or tactical, collaborating with colleagues on defining and tracking their preferred metrics will help manage disagreements and create more durable partnerships.

Other Perspectives

• The notion that Finance departments are solely interested in personnel and vendor costs against budget allocations may not capture the full scope of financial metrics that are important to them, such as cash flow, return on investment, or economic value added.
• While metrics for the CEO should align with the organization's business strategy, it is also important to ensure that these metrics are not overly simplified or disconnected from the day-to-day operations, which can lead to a lack of understanding of the actual challenges and processes within the Engineering department.
• Overemphasis on budgetary constraints could discourage the Engineering team from exploring new technologies or processes that require upfront investment but could lead to significant long-term savings or revenue.
• It assumes that all strategic groups have equal influence and control over the shared business goals, which may not account for the complexity of how different departments interact and contribute to these goals.
• Assessing peers from tactical groups solely on internal processes might overlook the value of their contributions to cross-functional projects and overall company objectives.
• The pursuit of alignment with various departmental metrics could lead to an overly complex and burdensome measurement system, reducing its effectiveness and increasing overhead.
• In some cases, disagreements among colleagues are rooted in fundamental differences in vision or strategy that cannot be resolved simply through the collaborative definition of metrics.

Avoid Common Pitfalls in Measuring Engineering Effectiveness

Measurement is crucial for leading Engineering effectively, but it’s a process that's easily misapplied. To avoid common measurement-related pitfalls, Larson suggests beginning with a limited number of quickly achievable, high-quality measures, instead of holding out for a perfectly imagined collection of metrics that aren’t readily available. Executives frequently fall into the trap of continuously adding new metrics, seeking the ideal feedback loop, but it's rarely the metrics that are causing problems when measurement goes awry. Instead, Larson says measurement fails when leaders misunderstand its limitations.

For instance, many executives attempt to use metrics to mend a damaged relationship with a frustrated CEO. It’s certainly true that a clear, measured read on a situation can help rebuild trust with a frustrated stakeholder, but generally it’s more effective to directly address the cause of the CEO’s frustration. Similarly, you might be tempted to over-index on the most-readily available data, such as the duration to close a pull request, even if it isn’t an accurate reflection of a team's effectiveness, or use individual data to evaluate individual performance, even though software development is mostly a team activity. Avoid these temptations by selecting metrics that accurately tell the story of what's happening and by understanding how your team is using the metrics. Lastly, and above all, track some metrics. Your organization can tolerate a limited quantity of poorly implemented or ineffective metrics, but it cannot tolerate having no metrics from which to learn.

Context

• Accurately measuring engineering effectiveness can be challenging due to the complexity of software development processes and the difficulty in quantifying qualitative aspects like team collaboration and innovation.
• A smaller set of metrics reduces the risk of analysis paralysis, where decision-making is stalled due to over-analysis of too much data.
• Leaders may selectively interpret metrics to confirm pre-existing beliefs or decisions, rather than using them to gain new insights.
• Regularly sharing metrics can demonstrate transparency in operations, which can build trust by showing stakeholders that the organization is accountable and open about its performance.
• Addressing frustration directly involves understanding the emotional and interpersonal dynamics at play, which metrics alone cannot capture. This requires empathy, active listening, and open communication to resolve underlying issues.
• Common examples include metrics like lines of code written or the number of commits made, which do not necessarily correlate with quality, efficiency, or the value delivered by the team.
• In team-based activities, responsibilities are often shared. Focusing on individual data might ignore the contributions of team members who support or enable others, skewing the perception of effectiveness.
• Combine quantitative metrics with qualitative data, such as team feedback or customer satisfaction, to gain a fuller picture of effectiveness.
• Understanding usage also involves considering the ethical implications of data collection and ensuring that metrics respect privacy and are used responsibly.
• Even flawed metrics can help establish a baseline for future improvements, providing a starting point for more accurate measurements.
• Effective metrics guide the allocation of resources by highlighting which areas require more attention or investment, ensuring that efforts are aligned with strategic goals.

Onboard and Develop Engineering Talent

Hiring and onboarding new engineers is one of an Engineering executive's most important contributions. Hiring is covered in Chapter 20; onboarding is a closely related topic, focused on helping those you have already recruited get started and become successful. Effective orientation initiatives support both onboarding quickly for most hires and creating a foundation for long-term individual growth within your organization.

Design a Successful Process for Onboarding Engineers

Effective engineering onboarding involves more than simply running through a list of topics. It's a programmatic effort that requires sustained organizational buy-in, sponsorship from a high-level leader, as well as sufficient coordination to keep it fresh. Larson emphasizes the importance of assigning someone to oversee onboarding and granting that person enough organizational authority and autonomy to make adjustments to the program design.

As a leader just starting out, you probably have a strong vision for how your onboarding program will look, and that vision is a valuable starting place. However, Larson cautions against a single, high-investment iteration on a completely new onboarding process. Rather, he recommends starting with something simple – enough material to run for a few days – and then iterating toward excellence over the course of a year. The aim is to establish both a procedure and a culture of receiving input that supports continual improvement. Larson suggests beginning the curriculum by anchoring on Engineering strategy and values, as well as system design and setting up a new development environment. These subjects provide a solid foundation for grasping past decisions made by the organization, the constraints around new decisions, and the skills necessary to begin doing work quickly.

Besides the program orchestrator, each newly hired engineer should have a dedicated onboarding buddy on their team to help handle the specifics of getting started, answer questions, ensure they feel integrated within the company, introduce them to other team members, and surface any onboarding challenges quickly. The final responsibility falls to the new hire's manager, who ensures the engineer thrives at the company over time, including defining personalized goals that supplement the onboarding’s standard curriculum and facilitating the selection of learning-oriented projects that provide real business value.

Context

• A high-level leader, such as a CTO or VP of Engineering, should actively support the onboarding process. This sponsorship can help secure necessary resources, such as budget and personnel, and can also lend credibility and importance to the onboarding program, encouraging participation and engagement across the organization.
• Regular coordination ensures that any changes in company policies or compliance requirements are promptly reflected in the onboarding process.
• Autonomy allows the overseer to establish and maintain a feedback loop with new hires and other stakeholders, facilitating continuous improvement of the onboarding process.
• By starting small, the onboarding program can be more easily adapted to fit the unique culture and values of the organization, ensuring that new hires are integrated smoothly.
• For input to be genuinely useful, employees must feel safe to express their thoughts without fear of negative consequences. This requires building an environment of trust where feedback is seen as a tool for growth rather than criticism.
• By focusing on these foundational elements, new hires gain insight into the decision-making framework of the organization, which is essential for contributing to future innovations and improvements.
• By having a dedicated person to guide them, new engineers can become productive more quickly, as they have immediate access to resources and support.
• The buddy acts as a conduit for transferring tacit knowledge—unwritten, experience-based insights about the company’s processes and culture that are not covered in formal training materials.
• Managers are key in addressing any interpersonal or professional conflicts that may arise, ensuring a supportive and harmonious work environment.
• The manager plays a crucial role in understanding the new engineer's strengths, weaknesses, and career interests. This understanding helps in setting goals and selecting projects that are both challenging and rewarding, ensuring the engineer remains engaged and productive.

Integrate Internal and External Hires Effectively

When it comes to hiring, Larson encourages moderation—hire some internally, hire some externally, hire from your network, and hire from beyond it as well. Depending excessively on a single approach will create an unbalanced culture—for example, if most of your new employees come from a previous employer, your current culture will consolidate into the culture you experienced there. He highlights two skills that he considers especially useful for balancing hiring sources: assessing internal candidates honestly and recruiting from beyond your existing network. Larson recommends identifying any areas of imbalance, either through direct observation or in a recurring hiring review meeting with the recruiting lead, and ensuring you have at least one counterbalancing hire in each unbalanced area.

Context

• Promoting from within can boost employee morale and demonstrate a clear path for career advancement, while external hires can fill gaps that internal candidates may not be ready for.
• Employees who feel that the company values a particular background or network over others may feel undervalued or overlooked, leading to decreased morale and higher turnover rates.
• Diverse hiring practices can help reduce unconscious biases that may arise from hiring predominantly from familiar networks or backgrounds.
• These meetings often involve analyzing data such as hiring metrics, candidate demographics, and retention rates. This data-driven approach helps in making informed decisions about adjusting hiring strategies.
• Hiring from beyond existing networks can expand the organization's reach and connections, potentially opening up new opportunities for collaboration and growth.

Train and Develop High-Performing Engineering Managers

Training is crucial for supporting successful recruitment, and Larson recommends a method of observing and being observed to ensure alignment among interviewers. However, it's just as crucial to train hiring managers on effective hiring practices as it is to train interviewers. As an executive, watch out for common hiring antipatterns like hiring managers pursuing unrealistic unicorn candidates from their recruiting team or blaming recruiters for their inability to close candidates who don’t fit within the company’s compensation bands––these are issues that you should proactively train and coach managers about instead of accepting them as an unfortunate reality of hiring. Finally, Larson advises reminding hiring managers that hiring processes exist to serve their hiring needs, not the other way around, and encouraging occasional deviations from those processes when there are urgent problems that should be solved over process.

Practical Tips

• You can enhance your understanding of effective training by volunteering to assist in onboarding new hires at your workplace. By observing the training process from a support role, you'll gain insights into what works and what doesn't, which can inform how you might approach training if you were to lead it. For example, take note of how new employees respond to different training styles or materials and consider how you might adapt them to improve engagement and retention of information.
• Use video recording to self-assess your interviewing skills. Set up a camera or use your smartphone to record a practice interview session with a friend or family member acting as the interviewee. Watch the playback and note areas where your questioning could be more aligned with the job requirements or company culture. This self-observation can highlight unconscious habits or inconsistencies in your interviewing approach that you might not notice in the moment.
• Use role-playing scenarios during interviews to assess problem-solving and interpersonal skills. Instead of just asking about past experiences, present candidates with a hypothetical work challenge and ask them to walk you through their approach to solving it. This can reveal their thought process, creativity, and ability to handle work-related issues in real-time.
• You can create a "reality-check" worksheet for each position you're hiring for to avoid chasing unrealistic candidates. On this worksheet, list the essential skills and qualifications that are absolutely necessary for the job, and then compare them with the "nice-to-haves" that are not critical. This will help you distinguish between what you need and what you can compromise on, preventing you from holding out for a candidate who may not exist.
• Implement a candidate feedback survey post-interview process. Candidates can provide anonymous feedback on their perception che the hiring process, which can highlight areas where managers might be unknowingly engaging in antipatterns. For example, if multiple candidates mention feeling that certain questions were irrelevant or that the process seemed disorganized, this feedback can prompt a review and improvement of the hiring protocol.
• Create a personalized hiring checklist that aligns with your career goals to evaluate if a company's hiring process meets your needs. When researching potential employers, use this checklist to assess whether their hiring practices, such as communication transparency, interview structure, and values alignment, serve your interests. This way, you can prioritize applying to companies whose hiring processes suggest a mutual fit.
• Develop a partnership with a staffing agency that specializes in providing talent for short-term, high-impact roles. By having a pre-arranged agreement, you can quickly bring in external experts to tackle urgent problems without the delay of a standard hiring process. This strategy allows you to inject fresh ideas and specialized skills into your team exactly when needed.

Defining and Executing an Engineering Plan

As a leader in engineering, one of your highest impact tasks is guiding your organization's overall engineering strategy—the organizational constitution that defines resourcing, operational guidelines, and decision-making processes. Larson advises viewing your current approach as an implicit strategy rather than delaying until you create a formal written strategy. The challenge lies not in developing a strategy, but rather in documenting, clarifying, and refining your current methods.

Diagnose the Current Condition and Constraints of the Organization

Larson argues that creating an effective Engineering strategy starts with diagnosing the organization's current context, which is an exercise fraught with bias. He emphasizes the importance of independently documenting this diagnosis instead of depending on existing accounts that are often over-simplified or incomplete. The author recommends writing a concise, explicit diagnosis that frames the problem and aligns your leadership team on what must be addressed by your strategy, even if you think you already understand the situation.

How Your Engineering Plans Relate to Your Overall Business Strategy

Your Engineering strategy is not written in isolation; it must be deeply integrated with the company's overall business strategy and the strategies of interweaving functions, such as the Product strategy. Larson emphasizes that effectively setting engineering resource distribution, technical standards, and decision-making guidelines depends on accurate diagnoses of adjacent strategies. This means, in particular, that you shouldn't launch into crafting an Engineering strategy until you have a solid grasp of your company’s business plan and your Product organization's approach.

Other Perspectives

• There may be scenarios where the engineering team needs to focus on building core competencies or addressing technical debt, which might not have immediate or direct alignment with the current business strategy but are crucial for long-term sustainability.
• Resource distribution in engineering could be influenced by external factors such as talent availability, budget constraints, or partnerships, which might not be directly related to the company's current business strategy.
• A rigid adherence to existing business and product strategies may stifle engineering creativity and limit the potential for disruptive technological advancements.

Find Weaknesses in Your Comprehension of Company Strategies

In many cases, your company might not have plans documented beyond your function's. Larson recommends privately writing a draft strategy for each of the most important strategies that the strategy for your Engineering department depends on and reviewing those drafts with the appropriate executive to ensure your diagnosis is accurate. It may be challenging, but you cannot reliably evaluate what your organization needs and is constrained by without first understanding the broader business environment and goals.

Other Perspectives

• Drafting strategies for other departments may lead to overstepping boundaries, as individuals may not have the expertise or insight into the specific challenges and nuances of those departments.
• There may be confidentiality concerns with sharing draft strategies widely, even with executives, especially if the information is sensitive or could impact the company's competitive position if leaked.
• In some cases, the broader business environment and goals may be in a state of flux, making it difficult to accurately evaluate organizational needs and constraints at any given time.

Guide Policies for Resource Allocation, Rules, and Decision-Making

With a clear diagnosis of your organization's requirements and limitations, your next step, according to Larson, is to set the policies that will guide the response to them. These guiding policies are most impactful when they answer three key questions from the perspective of your Engineering organization.

Ensure Policies Are Applicable, Enforced, and Leverage

To maximize the effectiveness of your policies, Larson recommends ensuring each one can be enforced, applied, and creates tangible leverage. Applicability means being practically useful in managing and resolving real decisions – these are living guidelines rather than abstract aspirations. Enforcement means that groups are responsible for adhering to them—if you don't want to enforce a policy, even in the case of a high-performing individual or a friendly coworker, then it shouldn’t exist. Finally, any policy must create substantial leverage, either through direct efficiency gains (e.g., eliminating unnecessary tasks or decision-making overhead) or by enabling the creation of additional impact (e.g., emphasizing a narrow technical stack supports deeper tooling investments).

Context

• Policies should be written in clear, straightforward language to ensure that all employees can easily understand and apply them in their daily work.
• Clearly defined consequences for not adhering to policies are essential. These can range from corrective actions and retraining to more severe penalties, depending on the nature and impact of the non-compliance.
• Leaders who enforce policies consistently are seen as credible and trustworthy, which can enhance their authority and effectiveness within the organization.
• Policies can shape organizational culture by reinforcing desired behaviors and values, which in turn can lead to a more cohesive and motivated workforce.
• Specialized tools and optimizations tailored to a specific stack can enhance scalability and performance, as they are designed to work seamlessly with the chosen technologies.

Balancing Engineering Technology Standards and Experimentation

Larson highlights the inherent tension between establishing a norm with effective solutions and proactively investigating better technologies. Standardization facilitates rapid execution by narrowing the potential problems to solve (e.g., "we always use Golang for backend services"), but eventually leads to a situation where you've reached a local maxima of performance but don't have mechanisms in place to move toward the global maxima. Alternatively, a focus on exploration opens the door to finding those superior techniques (e.g., "we're conducting an experiment using Rust for backend development"), although it can also bog down execution by generating excessive overhead and complex operations.

To balance between these competing priorities, Larson recommends that: (1) companies usually favor standardization; (2) explorations should be rigorously evaluated to ensure they provide improvements by a factor of at least 10 over the existing approach; and (3) organizations cap how many explorations they pursue concurrently. Applying these criteria ensures that exploration is viewed as a valuable investment with a high bar for success, rather than simply as an opportunity to try new things without making them responsible for generating demonstrable improvements over existing techniques.

Context

• Investigating new technologies can introduce risks such as increased complexity, potential integration issues, and the need for additional training, which can slow down current operations.
• When a team standardizes, it limits the scope of potential issues to those that are already well-understood within the chosen framework, allowing for quicker identification and resolution of problems.
• Although initially resource-intensive, successful exploration can lead to long-term efficiencies by streamlining processes or reducing costs through more effective technologies.
• Frequent changes in technology can disrupt established workflows, causing confusion and reducing overall efficiency.
• In many industries, adhering to standards is necessary to meet regulatory requirements. Standardization helps ensure that products and processes comply with industry norms and legal standards.
• Setting a high bar for improvement fosters a culture of ambitious innovation. It encourages teams to think creatively and push boundaries, aiming for breakthroughs that can redefine industry standards.
• Fewer concurrent projects enable teams to learn from each exploration and apply insights to future projects, fostering a culture of continuous improvement.
• Establishing criteria helps prioritize which explorations to fund, ensuring that resources are not spread too thin and are used effectively to maximize potential returns.

Translate Strategy to Coherent Actions

Once you’ve established guiding policies for your strategy, the last step is to document actions to carry out those policies. Effective actions, according to Larson, will make it clear how a given policy is enforced, how to escalate if you believe it isn’t working in your scenario, and the process for transitioning between the existing, pre-policy status and the post-policy status. These actions aren't necessarily massive, one-time transformations––for example, you may implement a guiding policy of prioritizing your core business area ahead of secondary areas and the corresponding action may be a reorganization of product engineering teams to better align with that prioritization. It's unlikely that reorganizing quarterly will be necessary to support that policy, but it’s an important one-time step that makes the policy's impact clear.

Establish the Required Enforcement, Escalation, and Transitioning Mechanisms

While enforcing the strategy is often easier for leadership than for an engineer in a senior technical role, you must nonetheless document how each policy will be enforced. Frequently, this occurs through an existing mechanism, such as requiring all new services to be approved in the technical specification review forum.

It's essential to provide a clear and unambiguous way to escalate if anyone believes a guiding policy is inapplicable to their situation. In many cases, the best escalation path is a multi-step process that leverages the reporting chain, such as: (1) attempting to resolve the disagreement collaboratively, (2) escalating with those involved to the next level of their reporting chain, and (3) if still unresolved, collectively elevating to the executive of engineering. Even more importantly, you should make sure that the individual escalating understands why this process works the way it does, and in particular that going “outside the process” to escalate to the CEO will ultimately undermine long-term trust and create a worse outcome for all those involved.

Context

• Leaders are often trained in conflict resolution and negotiation, skills that are crucial when enforcing strategies that may face resistance or disagreement. They can mediate and find solutions that align with strategic goals.
• These forums are typically gatherings where technical leaders and stakeholders review and approve new projects or changes, ensuring they align with organizational standards and strategies.
• Escalation processes are designed to ensure that issues are addressed at the appropriate level of authority, allowing for more informed decision-making and maintaining organizational efficiency.
• Utilizing the reporting chain ensures that each level of management is aware of ongoing issues, which can lead to more comprehensive solutions and prevent surprises at higher levels.
• Trust within an organization is built on predictable and transparent processes. When individuals bypass established procedures, it can signal a lack of faith in the system, leading to distrust among team members and leadership.

Unveil and Socialize the Strategy Throughout the Company

Writing your strategy is essential, but not enough; you also need to share it with the organization, explain the rationale behind it, and be willing to iterate on it over time. Larson recommends developing a working group of trusted individuals, ideally a few staff engineers, some Engineering managers, and stakeholders from Product and elsewhere, to refine the strategy's initial drafts. After you have a solid draft, distribute it to the full leadership team and any other impacted stakeholders, then privately address any significant feedback. Once you've incorporated that feedback, and the strategy is complete, present it to the team broadly in a large meeting.

Context

• The iterative refinement process allows for continuous improvement and adaptation of the strategy, making it more resilient to changes in the business environment or technological landscape.
• This step allows for the collection of diverse perspectives and expertise, which can identify potential oversights or areas for improvement in the strategy.
• Private conversations can help clarify misunderstandings or misinterpretations of the strategy before they become widespread, ensuring a more unified understanding across the organization.
• Such meetings often utilize visual aids like slides or charts to make complex information more digestible and can include interactive elements like Q&A sessions to enhance understanding.

Talent Management and Organizational Alignment

As a leader, one of your highest-impact responsibilities is building and managing your leadership team. In addition to navigating those relationships effectively, you’ll also be leading evaluations and pay-related procedures, running cultural surveys, and generally keeping up your organization's overall morale.

Develop and Empower Your Organization's Functional Leaders

Building and effectively operating a high-judgment functional leadership team is one of the key responsibilities of an Engineering executive. As the leader of Engineering, you're responsible for developing the individuals on your team, facilitating alignment between them, and creating a leadership model that supports ongoing delegation and growth.

Define Clear Roles and Responsibilities for the Team

Larson suggests that as an executive in engineering, your "first team" isn't the people who report directly to you—it's your fellow functional leaders. It is easier to build effective connections with those you supervise, because your incentives are generally aligned with one another, but building trust and facilitating strong bonds with your peers requires continuous effort and attention.

To create a high-performing leadership team, Larson advises to first diagnose how effective your current team is. For individuals who are actively causing damage, make the change quickly—it is better for them and for the organization to be done. For individuals who may have potential, but who are not effectively leading, clearly and transparently articulate your expectations for improvement, and be direct about the consequences of not making those improvements. Once you’ve completed those individual adjustments, consider whether your organization’s reporting structure is preventing key individuals from leading the most important areas or whether it’s causing a lack of representation for teams that you value. Avoid significant team restructuring, as stability is uniquely valuable for organizations, but don’t be overly cautious either––if the existing team structure is hindering crucial decisions and slowing work, then modify it.

Context

• By considering fellow functional leaders as the primary team, executives can focus on aligning departmental strategies with the overall business objectives, ensuring that all parts of the organization work towards common goals.
• Continuous effort in building trust includes addressing conflicts openly and constructively. This helps in preventing misunderstandings and fostering a collaborative environment.
• Reflect on the leadership style being employed and its effectiveness in motivating and guiding the team towards its objectives.
• Keeping individuals who are causing damage can lead to misallocation of resources, as time and effort are spent managing issues rather than focusing on strategic goals.
• Leaders should use emotional intelligence to deliver feedback in a way that is constructive and motivating, rather than demoralizing.
• Inefficient reporting lines can create bottlenecks, where decisions are delayed because the right people are not involved in the decision-making process. This can slow down project timelines and reduce organizational agility.
• Significant restructuring can lead to confusion, decreased morale, and a temporary drop in productivity as team members adjust to new roles and reporting lines. It can also create uncertainty about job security.
• Direct communication about consequences is a key component of effective performance management, helping to align individual goals with organizational objectives.

Foster Collaboration and Resolve Internal Conflicts

A fundamental tension exists between a team's individual members and the team itself—members are typically rewarded for their individual performance and impact, while the group is most effective when individuals deprioritize the parts of their work that are not maximizing overall group performance. Larson’s advice for striking that balance is to clarify early your expectations of team members, especially around: (1) how the company expects them to lead their team; (2) how they communicate with peers; (3) how they stay aligned with their peers’ work; (4) how they are building their own team; and (5) how they communicate with you about their goals, priorities, and challenges.

Context

• Companies often have incentive structures like bonuses, promotions, or recognition programs that are tied to individual achievements, encouraging employees to focus on personal success.
• While setting expectations is important, it is equally crucial to remain adaptable. Teams should be prepared to adjust expectations in response to changing circumstances or new information, ensuring that they remain relevant and effective.
• Building a team goes beyond hiring; it involves creating a culture of trust, inclusivity, and continuous learning. Leaders should focus on developing their team’s skills and fostering a sense of belonging.

Ensure Team Clarity and Cohesion

In addition to operating effectively within their own organization, each member of your team will also join the broader leadership team at the company. This can be a tricky transition for new leaders attending executive-level meetings without having their own executive to "run interference" for them. Larson encourages investing time into helping those leaders navigate that relationship by meeting regularly with them, creating space to talk through concerns, and being direct about how to engage with you effectively.

Context

• The pressure to contribute meaningfully to discussions and decisions can be overwhelming, especially when the stakes are high and the outcomes impact the entire organization.
• Navigating relationships involves understanding the informal power structures and politics within the organization, which can impact decision-making and influence.
• Encouraging open dialogue can lead to increased innovation, as diverse perspectives and ideas are shared and explored.
• Being direct about engagement strategies can aid in resolving conflicts quickly by addressing issues head-on.

Measure and Improve Organizational Health and Culture

As the person leading engineering, you're responsible for the organization's long-term health and culture, a responsibility that becomes increasingly important as your organization grows beyond a size that you can build relationships with every individual. While it's possible to assess culture qualitatively through the quality of tech spec reviews, incidents, and meetings, Larson finds that periodic cultural surveys are also an especially helpful tool for this.

Use Surveys to Spot and Solve Issues

Larson recommends reviewing cultural survey responses by focusing on absolute ratings (e.g., a high rating remains high, even if it has recently decreased) and identifying a broad picture of your organization's current state, rather than digging directly into the issues you are most familiar with. A high-impact strategy for efficiently reading survey results involves analyzing the company's overall results rather than just the Engineering results, focusing on the highest and lowest scores, identifying ratings that have changed the fastest or that are unexpected, comparing ratings across different cohorts of the organization, and personally reading every comment to gain a broader subjective view of the data trends.

Context

• By concentrating on absolute ratings, leaders can avoid overemphasizing minor fluctuations that might not significantly impact the overall cultural health of the organization.
• Understanding company-wide trends can guide leadership in prioritizing resources and initiatives that will have the most significant impact across the organization.
• Low scores might indicate potential risks or vulnerabilities that need immediate attention to prevent larger issues.
• Regularly comparing cohort data over time can help track the effectiveness of implemented changes and ensure continuous improvement in addressing cohort-specific issues.
• Comments can reveal emerging trends or recurring themes that might not be immediately apparent in numerical data alone.

Develop Accountability and Reliability Through Transparent Communication

After you have spent some time studying your organization's cultural survey results, Larson advises against falling into the trap of either promising to fix everything or avoiding action entirely—both extremes will undermine your team's confidence in you. Instead, focus on identifying two or three key aspects in which you think you can achieve meaningful progress, and then follow through on those commitments, reporting on your progress regularly. Selecting areas to focus on requires carefully considering the data and getting feedback from the people who report to you, peer executives, your People team representative, and a few trusted individual contributors.

Context

• Engaging with various stakeholders to select focus areas ensures that the chosen initiatives align with broader organizational goals and address the most pressing concerns.
• By committing to and delivering on specific improvements, leaders can foster a culture of accountability, where promises are met with action and results.
• Regular updates help in assessing whether the right resources are allocated to the initiatives, allowing for timely adjustments if necessary.
• Using data helps in making objective decisions rather than relying solely on intuition or anecdotal evidence, which can be biased or incomplete.
• Often part of the Human Resources department, this person can provide expertise on organizational culture, employee engagement, and best practices for implementing changes that affect personnel.

Develop Principles to Foster Desired Culture

According to Larson, declared values have no magical ability to transform a team or change a company; they merely reinforce change that is already happening. Your values should be an honest and clear reflection of the behavior you're already seeing in your organization, and they will facilitate onboarding new hires while slowly nudging existing teams toward the same behaviors and practices.

To create and maintain useful, impactful values, Larson recommends evaluating each proposed principle for reversibility, relevance, and truthfulness. Reversibility entails the ability to rewrite it to reflect an alternative view about a topic without seeming nonsensical. For instance, a company centered on customer needs could be reversed to Be Frugal for Employees, or to Maximize Growth. Both reversed principles depict practices that a potentially successful company could employ, and the decision between the three principles is a decision about culture. Applicability means it can assist you in making decisions and managing difficult situations. Amazon's Dive Deep is a great example of a value that is applicable: When confronted with a complex, unknown scenario, you should investigate the details thoroughly before proceeding.

Honesty means that the value truly reflects actual behavior—you can state a given value, but you can make it an organizational value only through your behavior.

Finally, for some concrete examples of the Engineering values he has found useful, Larson suggests: (1) Generate capacity instead of merely using what's available, (2) Choose vendors as a default unless the competency is central to our operations, (3) Use established patterns unless major improvements are needed, (4) Optimize for the whole (or business unit or team), and (5) Engage with conflict by being curious.

Context

• Reinforcing existing changes through declared values can provide a sense of stability and consistency, which is crucial during periods of growth or transition.
• Shared values can serve as a common ground for resolving conflicts, as they provide a reference point for acceptable behavior and decision-making processes.
• Evaluating principles for these criteria helps ensure they are not only aspirational but also achievable and reflective of the organization's identity, fostering a cohesive and consistent culture.
• Reversibility allows companies to pivot their strategies without losing coherence. It ensures that values are not rigidly fixed but can evolve as the organization grows or as market conditions change.
• When values are applicable, they empower employees to make decisions autonomously. This is because they provide a clear understanding of what is expected, reducing the need for constant supervision and approval.
• Employees are more likely to be engaged and motivated when they see that the company’s values are not just words but are embodied in the actions of leadership and colleagues. This engagement can lead to higher productivity and job satisfaction.
• This principle advocates for leveraging proven methods and frameworks to ensure stability and reliability. It suggests that innovation should be pursued when it offers significant benefits, thus balancing the need for change with the risks associated with untested approaches.
• Generating capacity involves actively seeking ways to expand resources, such as investing in new technologies or training, rather than relying solely on existing assets.
• Vendors can provide scalable solutions that can be adjusted based on the company’s needs, offering flexibility that might be harder to achieve with in-house teams.
• Established patterns often come with a wealth of documentation and community support, making systems easier to scale and maintain over time.
• Focusing on the whole often leads to sustainable growth and long-term benefits, as it prioritizes the overall health and success of the organization over short-term gains.
• Engaging with conflict through curiosity can enhance empathy, as it encourages individuals to put themselves in others' shoes, leading to more compassionate and effective communication.

Managing Energy and Priorities as a Supervisor

Doing impactful, meaningful work is an essential part of a leader in engineering's role, but so is staying energized to continue doing difficult work that lacks immediate reward for an extended period of time. A professional journey is, fundamentally, a marathon, not a sprint, and pacing appropriately is as vital as performing well.

Balance Company, Team, and Yourself Needs

Larson formerly employed a hierarchy of "organization, group, personal" for prioritizing work—meaning, prioritize the organization's needs first, your group's second, and your personal needs last—but now believes that framework is subtly flawed, as work that is of greatest value is seldom most engaging, and the company won’t always appreciate the work you do even if it is the most valuable work. Strictly following that company-first framework led many talented engineers he worked with to lose energy and become disengaged, ultimately hindering their influence. Instead, Larson suggests a more dynamic framework that centers on reciprocity, where you generally prioritize your company's and team's needs, but occasionally and deliberately prioritize energizing tasks when you're losing momentum, particularly those that are independent from what the company requires (e.g., attending a few conferences or making a few angel investments) but that don’t violate the company's values (e.g., rewriting your core API in an untested, trendy new programming language). Ultimately, if you find that the balance between energy and alignment cannot be maintained for a year or longer, it’s time to think about moving on to avoid burning out. This might involve changing how you work, switching roles, or leaving the company.

Context

• Ignoring personal needs for extended periods can lead to burnout, a state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion caused by prolonged stress, which can significantly impact career longevity and satisfaction.
• Prioritizing company needs can disrupt work-life balance, leading to stress and dissatisfaction. Engineers may feel they lack time for personal interests or family, impacting overall well-being.
• These are tasks that boost motivation and engagement, often because they align with personal interests or passions. They can help prevent burnout by providing a sense of fulfillment and excitement.
• This approach promotes flexibility, recognizing that rigid adherence to company priorities can lead to disengagement and that occasional deviation can be beneficial.
• Engaging in activities like conferences and investments can contribute to personal development, which in turn can enhance professional performance by broadening perspectives and skills.
• Company values often encompass ethical standards. Prioritizing tasks that violate these values could lead to ethical breaches, which might result in legal issues or damage to professional relationships.
• Deciding to move on from a role or company is a strategic decision that should consider long-term career goals, market opportunities, and personal values. It involves assessing whether current conditions support or hinder future aspirations.

Avoid the Trap of Overworking and Disengagement

According to Larson, the most common reasons executives get disengaged are: (1) external life demands (family, friends, sickness, and so on) break their working habits and they haven’t compensated, (2) their distance from their team to avoid appearing to be micromanaging has become too far, and now they are uninvolved rather than supportive, (3) they are chasing energy in places that they haven’t properly integrated into their work (angel investing, starting their own company, and so on).

For the first two issues, a trusted peer or attentive manager can often step in to provide the necessary corrective feedback. Alternatively, self-diagnosis can work as well: ask yourself “how would I know if someone on my team was struggling without them telling me?” and apply that diagnosis to yourself. For the last category, where disengagement stems from seeking energy in other places, a more proactive and potentially awkward conversation is needed. A manager or peer can help, but you may need to have an open dialogue with the CEO or your team to clarify the work you want to do and explain why that work is necessary for you to maintain your engagement.

Other Perspectives

• External life demands might not always break working habits; in some cases, they could provide a renewed sense of purpose or urgency that can enhance engagement with work.
• Executives may distance themselves not to avoid micromanaging, but because they trust their team's expertise and want to empower them to make decisions independently.
• External activities like angel investing might serve as a necessary mental break or form of relaxation for some executives, which can help prevent burnout and maintain long-term engagement in their primary job.
• The effectiveness of corrective feedback is contingent on the willingness of the disengaged individual to accept and act on it, which is not guaranteed.
• Self-diagnosis may lack objectivity, as individuals might have blind spots regarding their own behavior or performance.
• The assumption that seeking energy in other places is a problem to be fixed may not always hold true; diversifying interests can sometimes enhance overall engagement and bring fresh perspectives to one's primary work.
• Open dialogue with the CEO or team, while potentially beneficial, may not always be feasible due to hierarchical or organizational barriers that can inhibit frank discussions.