(by Will Larson; ISBN ...)

2. Organizations

An organization is a collection of people working toward a shared goal. ... 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. If process is too weak a force, and culture too slow, then organizational design lives between those two.

3. Tools

This chapter provides a box of tools for managing change, both from the abstract chair of guiding change and form the more visceral role of serving as glue during periods of transition.

4. Approaches

5. Culture

6. Careers

7. Appendix


Chapter 3: Tools

3.5: Guiding broad organizational change with metrics

3.6: Migrations: the sole scalable fix to tech debt

3.6.1: Why migrations matter
3.6.2: Running good migrations

3.7: Running an engineering re-org

3.7.1: Is a re-org the right tool?
3.7.2: Project head count a year out
3.7.4: Defining teams and groups
3.7.5: Staffing the teams and groups
3.7.6: Commit to moving forward
3.7.7: Roll out the change

3.8: Identify your controls

3.9: Career narratives

3.9.1: Artificial competition
3.9.2: Translating goals

3.10: The briefest of media trainings

3.11: Model, document, and share

3.11.1: How it works
3.11.2: Where it works

3.12: Scaling consistency: designing centralized decision-making groups

3.12.1: Positive and negative freedoms:

3.13: Presenting to senior leadership

3.14: Time management

3.15: Communities of learning

Chapter 4: Approaches

4.1: Work the policy, not the exceptions

4.1.1: Good policy is opinionated
4.1.2: Exception debt
4.1.3: Work the policy

4.2: Saying no

4.2.1: Constraints
4.2.2: Velocity
4.2.3: Priorities
4.2.4: Relationships

4.3: Your philosophy of management

4.3.1: An ethical profession
4.3.2: Strong relationships > any problem
4.3.3: People over process
4.3.4: Do the hard thing now
4.3.5: Your company, your team, yourself
4.3.6: Think for yourself

4.4: Managing in the growth plates

4.4.1: In the growth plates
4.4.2: Outside the growth plates
4.4.3: Aligning with values

4.5: Ways engineering managers get stuck

4.6: Partnering with your manager

4.7: Finding managerial scope

4.8: Setting organizational direction

4.8.1: Scarce feedback, vague direction
4.8.2: Mining for direction

4.9: Close out, solve, or delegate

Chapter 5: Culture

5.1: Opportunity and membership

5.1.1: Opportunity
5.1.2: Membership

5.2: Select project leads

5.3: Make your peers your first team

5.4: Consider the team you have for senior positions

5.5: Company culture and managing freedoms

5.6: Kill your heroes, stop doing it harder

5.6.2: Kill the hero programmer
5.6.3: A long time coming, a long time going
5.6.4: Resetting broken systems

Chapter 6: Careers

6.1: Roles over rocket ships, and why hypergrowth is a weak predictor of personal growth

6.1.2: Opportunities for growth

6.2: Running a humane interview process

6.2.1: Be kind
6.2.3: Finding signal
6.2.4: Be prepared
6.2.5: Deliberately express interest
6.2.6: Feedback loops

6.3: Cold sourcing: hire someone you don't know

6.3.1: Moving beyond your personal networks
6.3.2: Your first cold sourcing recipe
6.3.3: Is this high-leverage work?

6.4: Hiring funnel

6.4.1: Funnel fundamentals
6.4.2: Instrument and optimize
6.4.3: Extending the funnel

6.5: Performance management systems

6.5.1: Career ladders
6.5.2: Performance designations
6.5.3: Performance cycles

6.6: Career levels, designation momentum, level splits, etc.

6.7: Creating specialized roles, like SRE or TPMs

6.7.1: Challenges
6.7.2: Facilitating success
6.7.3: Advantages
6.7.4: What to do?

6.8: Designing an interview loop


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Last modified 06 April 2022