The engineering mindset

Will Larson, CTO of Carta and former engineering leader at Stripe, Uber, and Calm, and author of An Elegant Puzzle and Staff Engineer, discusses how engineering work and leadership are changing after the zero-interest-rate era. The conversation covers systems thinking, engineering strategy, writing as a practice, EM/PM partnership, measuring engineering productivity, company values, and his experience during the Digg V4 rewrite.

01Key learnings

• Treat engineers as capable adults by giving them hard problems and accountability, which lets them grow into senior leadership roles rather than shielding them from real business issues.
• Build simple stock-and-flow models of processes like hiring pipelines, then compare them against historical data to find where reality diverges and where to intervene first.
• Write your engineering strategy down, even imperfectly; an unwritten strategy cannot be debugged or improved, and every function has one whether or not it is documented.
• Good engineering strategy is often boring, such as standardizing on existing tools or a single monolith, because it focuses limited capacity on what the company values and imposes useful constraints.
• Diagnose strategy by honestly confronting constraints; most bad strategies come from wishful thinking that refuses to accept what the real limits are.
• When writing for growth, publish frequently, write about what energizes you, and focus on sustaining the practice over years rather than chasing trends or audiences.
• For PM-engineering partnerships, understand each party's real incentives before arguing, and consider aligning performance ratings so peers share accountability for outcomes.
• Measure engineering productivity with diagnostic metrics like DORA to find improvement areas, while using roadmaps of impact and regular conversations with teams to demonstrate effectiveness to leadership.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.