Will Larson

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Michael
601 books | 26 friends


Will Larson

Goodreads Author


Member Since
July 2019


2024 in review.

A lot happened for me this year.I continued learning the details of fund accounting at Carta,which is likely the most complex product domain I’ve worked in.My third book was published, and I did a small speaking tour to support it.We started the unironically daunting San Francisco kindergarten application process.I was diagnosed with skin cancer and had successful surgery to remove it.All things c

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Published on December 14, 2024 04:00
Average rating: 4.09 · 6,303 ratings · 601 reviews · 9 distinct worksSimilar authors
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Will’s Recent Updates

Will Larson wrote a new blog post

2024 in review.

A lot happened for me this year.I continued learning the details of fund accounting at Carta,which is likely the most complex product domain I’ve work Read more of this blog post »
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The Engineering Executive's Primer by Will Larson
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Quotes by Will Larson  (?)
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“Where to stash your organizational risk? Lately, I’m increasingly hearing folks reference the idea of organizational debt. This is the organizational sibling of technical debt, and it represents things like biased interview processes and inequitable compensation mechanisms. These are systemic problems that are preventing your organization from reaching its potential. Like technical debt, these risks linger because they are never the most pressing problem. Until that one fateful moment when they are. Within organizational debt, there is a volatile subset most likely to come abruptly due, and I call that subset organizational risk. Some good examples might be a toxic team culture, a toilsome fire drill, or a struggling leader. These problems bubble up from your peers, skip-level one-on-ones,16 and organizational health surveys. If you care and are listening, these are hard to miss. But they are slow to fix. And, oh, do they accumulate! The larger and older your organization is, the more you’ll find perched on your capable shoulders. How you respond to this is, in my opinion, the core challenge of leading a large organization. How do you continue to remain emotionally engaged with the challenges faced by individuals you’re responsible to help, when their problem is low in your problems queue? In that moment, do you shrug off the responsibility, either by changing roles or picking powerlessness? Hide in indifference? Become so hard on yourself that you collapse inward? I’ve tried all of these! They weren’t very satisfying. What I’ve found most successful is to identify a few areas to improve, ensure you’re making progress on those, and give yourself permission to do the rest poorly. Work with your manager to write this up as an explicit plan and agree on what reasonable progress looks like. These issues are still stored with your other bags of risk and responsibility, but you’ve agreed on expectations. Now you have a set of organizational risks that you’re pretty confident will get fixed, and then you have all the others: known problems, likely to go sideways, that you don’t believe you’re able to address quickly. What do you do about those? I like to keep them close. 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 something simply isn’t likely to go well, I think it’s best to hold the bag yourself. You may be the best suited to manage the risk, but you’re almost certainly the best positioned to take responsibility. As an organizational leader, you’ll always have a portfolio of risk, and you’ll always be doing very badly at some things that are important to you. That’s not only okay, it’s unavoidable.”
Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“The fact that something stops working at significantly increased scale is a sign that it was designed appropriately to the previous constraints rather than being over-designed.23”
Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“I can’t stress enough that these fixes are slow. This is because systems accumulate months or years of static, and you have to drain that all away. Conversely, the same properties that make these fixes slow to fix make them extremely durable once in effect!”
Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management




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