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Will Larson

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2024-01-07

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2024-01-07

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1. “So, find me online lithhane.com L-E-T-H-A-I-N.com, all my writing, my books, everything links linked there. And the biggest thing that I'm thinking about right now is just strategy. So really curious for folks who are thinking about strategy, think they've done product, business, or engineering strategy well. We'd love to hear from folks what they're thinking about what's actually worked and maybe what are the lies that have not turned out to work that they thought might work earlier in their journey.”

   2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “Maybe the piece I'm most proud of from last year was hard to work with. So hard to work with is basically, I see a lot of people who are incredibly talented, but they try to hold their peers to a high standard and then they're viewed as combative or difficult to work with. And this one comes from a core struggle of my early career where I kept trying. I thought I was holding people accountable. People were just like used to have to work with. And I was like, but I'm just trying to have a high standard. Isn't that what we want? And every talk about like honest values, every company is like, we have high standards. And you're like, well, let's do it. And then they're like, we don't have high standards here. Like you suck. So that one's one that I really is so transformational to me. And I think it really hits some people hard because I think a lot of people really go their entire career without figuring this one out. And there's some of the most talented, hardest working people you'll ever work with and can't quite.”

   2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “No, no mottos, but I can think of like two things I thought about a lot at Uber or something I talk to people a lot because it was a challenging time for much of it was there's no way around just through and that was like, hey, we're not going to dodge around this. We're going to gut through it and we're going to get to the other side and then we're going to be there. What I think about a lot more now is Anyone remember what we decided in six months? I think people stress out about a lot of decisions, but I increasingly believe most decisions people stress out about just like aren't that important. So I'm like, why don't they only care in six months what we did here? And the answer is no, like just do something reasonable and let's move on to the next more important thing.”

   2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “A lot of my interviews now are trying to help people decide if they actually want to join a company. And so my favorite question I ask now is like, hey, we've really loved you. You're going to come through. I think you're going to get a lot of offers from other companies too. I bet you'll have three or four really compelling offers because you're a fantastic candidate. How are you going to figure out really specifically which of those options are right for you? And I think it forces people to tell you what they want. And then you tell them why you have that more than anyone else. And then you can actually pitch them on what matters versus pitching on things that don't.”

   2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “Don't watch much TV or many movies anymore, but something I do still watch is Top Chef with my wife. She's a top chef super fan. And there's something just like very relaxing from like these formulaic structured shows where we kind of know what's going to happen. There's no real consequences that that matter too much and just kind of escaping from real life to these like formulas can be pretty useful.”

   2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “So, I talked about thinking systems at Primer. I talked about good strategy, bad strategy, but I'll give you a third one, which is don't think of an elephant by George Lakeoff. It's a really interesting book about framing things and conversations that has really changed how I communicate”

   2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “It's for engineering executives, but more so, like anyone who wants to be one, anyone who's trying to figure out how to work with the engineering executive. So I think if you are struggling to understand why your CTO keeps doing boneheaded things, or if you want a side manage them, you're the head of product and you can't get the CTO to stop complaining about the engineers need more interesting projects to work on, this might be useful for YouTube.”

   2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “Think we've covered a lot of it. New book coming out, new book coming out in February, Engineering Executives Primer, O'Reilly, but that's probably it.”

   2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “Today, social news based on what my friends are actually reading and liking merged with a global index of kind of similar users who are interested in similar topics. It's just still a product that I think Google Reader has some kind of similar components to it. These are both interesting products solving interesting problems that have not, for whatever reason, been successful as businesses. And I do think there's a gap there still, but there's a lot of people trying unsuccessfully to fill it. And there must be a reason why people struggle to fill it despite so many people trying.”

   2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “Thing that really killed Dig is the change, it was an SEO driven. So monetization was from ads. Dig was many companies, including Dig, claimed that it was the first in kind of stream, in feed, like advertising company, where Twitter has ads within the tweets or Facebook does. But Dig did that before Facebook or Twitter really innovated kind of the ad format. But the vast majority of our monetization was on these like, we call them kermalink pages, which is the page where you've been like article we crawled in the vast inventory traffic for that was driven by Google search. And so there was an SEO change, which really is like the thing that started creating the urgency for us to launch this migration SEO change, traffic started going down, monetization was driven by that. And so we were already on fire by the time we tried to launch this. But I do think that I still want something like what Dig was trying to become.”

    2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “So it basically didn't work properly for much of the month. It was like read-only was back up in like about three days, but the vast majority of the actual user functionality just wasn't working properly for pretty much an entire month. And it was not that good. I mean, like not great. But that wasn't the biggest problem Dig had at that point. But it was one of the biggest problems that had at that point and it wasn't a real sign of things likely to go well for us. But like I said, you learn from those. And I'm really proud that we and the team got it working, got it, got it running, even if ultimately we still went to zero and ran out of money and kind of sold for parts.”

    2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “Would never voluntarily take on a lot of these really challenging things, but sometimes when they show up, you're with a group of people you really respect, you love working with, and you want to overcome together. And that's really powerful experience, even if Uber China was similar where like if someone had been like, hey, do you want to go work on this Uber China migration? I would have been like absolutely not. But like no one asked. They were just like, get this done. And so we did. And I think these things are pretty, pretty remarkable.”

    2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “At that point, and I learned so much. And I really like that the kernel that turned into my entire career was that opportunity, even though at the time it was pretty, pretty grim.”

    2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “It's working a couple weeks after that, like a new CEO came in, did around a layoffs. This is back in, I think, like 2012. The team, nine months after I started, was down to like 30 people from about 100. And they just went downhill from there, from a business perspective. But we launched a lot of functionality. It's really learned just a tremendous amount. And it kind of shaped like what I think about in terms of earlier career getting learning and going into a company that is maybe having a rough time. I became a manager like two and a half years into my career, three, basically running the entire engineering team there because everyone who had a lick of sense quit or got laid off. And it was just like complete idiot me like trying to like be the manager for the engineering org. It wasn't qualified and no one would have given me that job. But I was the only one dumb enough to take it.”

    2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “And then about three weeks after that, I finally figured out what the core bug was that was bringing us down every 12 hours. And it was this incredibly simple issue that had just been hard to debug, basically related to the way that Python initiates variables used as default parameters. Something like super, super silly. And we just had someone who hadn't written Python before who was working on the API code. So didn't realize Viscia that no one else caught it when it was reviewed. And it just took a long time to debug because it was like such a non-obvious, it didn't break anything. It was just doing a lot of extra, extra load on the servers. And we finally figured it out. And it was just really remarkable experience pulling through. And you know what? The company still went to zero. And so we had this dad launch. I think we did this heroic stretch together.”

    2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “Software, and we try to bring the site up and just keep scrashing. So it basically takes us a month to get it fully functional again. And so that day, sitting around that table with champagne and sushi, that's just like day one. And by 30 days in, most people aren't even trying to get the site back up anymore. There's maybe like five of us who are still trying. And we did. And I think that was like a really powerful moment for me. And I think in the first two days, like myself and Rich Schumacher, like one of the other engineers, we had to write a caching system from scratch, which got us like half the way up. Really a terrible way to do software on a side note. Like I'm not recommending this to anyone. This was like a series of anti-patterns clutched into a launch. But we got it perfectly up, but we had to restart it every 12 months. Basically, every server, sorry, every 12, 12 hours, every server had to be restarted even with the caching mechanism.”

    2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “This is a decision that never works out for anyone, and so I think as someone's more experienced, I could have predicted this wasn't going to work out. But I was earlier in my career, my PM counterpart at Yahoo, Dosh Gopanov, he went to Yahoo and he's like, come to dig. Worst case you'll make a couple hundred thousand in a year. Worst case, probably really great outcome. Anyway, that's not what happened. The worst case was a little bit optimistic. So we go and, you know, the CEO got fired two days before I joined. So the current CEO left and then Kevin Rose came back for about six months, something like that. And we're just on the death march trying to get this thing out. And so we push really hard. This is before the cloud for the most part. So we wiped all of pretty much all of our existing servers to reimage them to the new.”

    2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “The time that was far from obvious. And so we needed to move to support kind of social functionality. And the previous version, we simply couldn't get it to work. And so the decision that was done two and a half years before I joined and this shipped about six months after I joined was they needed to do a complete rewrite in order to get there.”

    2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “Big V4 is, I mean, still something I have a lot of fond memories for. There's one picture that I've kept is a picture of a lot of the engineers around this table in the middle of this giant office. And they're like serving sushi. We had waiters, caterers come in that day. They're serving sushi. We have plates with champagne flutes on it. There was a full bar. And we're all around this table because the site's not up. And so the four essentially what Kevin Rose or the board or some combination there realized is that Dig was losing to the social networks and that this idea of kind of aggregated news was going to be outcompeted by the Twitterers, the Facebooks, et cetera. If we didn't find a way to move to have a social component for it, even outcompeted by Reddit long term was kind of the fear.”

    2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “But I agree. If it doesn't apply to anyone, then why bother saying it? It's like it doesn't mean anything. And you could say it's actually like a hiring filter where there are people who you've explicitly chosen not to hire because this wouldn't apply to them. Then I think it's useful because it helps you actually figure out who to bring in. But if it doesn't apply to anyone you're hiring or anyone that you have in the company, then it just sort of isn't worth having because you already have too many values. You're already trying to get rid of values because you have like 17 and you need to get down to like four where people can remember them. So if it doesn't apply to anyone, like why bother having it at all?”

    2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “Of all, there's Netflix, which is like we're a team, like a sports team, we're not a family. And so a little bit reversible, but not perfectly. But yeah, these are the three that I found really useful for any value. Like as an honest, is it applicable? And can you reverse it? And if not, it's probably actually not helping the team make decisions.”

    2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “We solve customer problems that matter. Like, good. Who would ever say? What company doesn't think they're solving customer problems that matter? And so there are certain values that just you can't apply. And so I think of these as identity values. These are really just you describing who you want to be. We care about our customers. Great. But like who would say they don't care about that? There's certain values that I think of as just like identity values and they're not like they're not wrong to have identity values. They just aren't very useful. You can't actually use them for anything. And so I just always push people not to spend too much time on these because they feel good when you're an executive team kind of debating like what are these identity values? It's like we're kind to other people. Or sure that sounds good. Like we're a family. Sure, that sounds good. That one, I guess, is a little bit reversed.”

    2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “Let builders build toe stepping. There were a number of values that could be interpreted in different ways. And sometimes they got weaponized in various ways as all values do. But these are both interesting in different ways. And so number one is honest. Then two is applicable. Three is, I think, the last thing for a good value is this idea of reversibility. So there's some values that Aren't actually usable. And so here's a good example. We build good software. Like, okay, but why would you ever not build good software? That doesn't make sense.”

    2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “In value, but implicitly, Uber's value was do what's good for your team and ignore everyone else because that will slow us down. And so the two different companies had opposite values, but they're both very applicable. It's like, how should we navigate decisions? Should I optimize for my team or for the organization? And then so those are applicable to real problems. And they were honest. Where Uber was just like, don't worry about other people. Like make it work for your team. And that's how they move so fast because they just didn't worry.”

    2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “Be honest. And so any value can be honest, or there's no universally honest values, right? Like you can say something like we're thrifty, or you can say something like we spend as much as we need to get the best value. Those are totally different. And good companies are run both ways. So the first rule I think about a lot is honesty. You actually do what you claim you do and the value. The second one is like applicability. Like you have to have values that you can actually figure out how to apply to your work. And so one of Stripe's values was no longer a value, I believe, but it's optimized globally. And so optimized globally is a really interesting problem because sometimes you'll have something you want to do or interesting value. Sometimes you want to do something. And you're like, hey, I want to introduce a new programming language because that's better for my team. But for the organization overall, this is actually much worse for the organization. So I'm not going to do it. Uber didn't have this as a rich original.”

    2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “Values are really interesting, right? And different companies talk about values in different ways. I once worked at a company where the execs went to visit the Facebook campus. They saw the values rigid up on the wall, and they took the Facebook values and wrote them up in our walls. And that didn't do a whole lot. It maybe undermined people's confidence in the critical thinking of the executive team that just took these written up on Facebook walls and replicated it. But I think those values did work well for Facebook. And those values were meaningful for Facebook. And so first you can't do is just steal values. I value cargo culting, man. Users first, great Amazon value, right? A lot of companies aren't users first. And that's okay. But what's not okay is when you put, hey, we're users first and then you actually show the decisions you're making and you clearly aren't users first. And so one of the things I think about is just like honesty. And so good values have to.”

    2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “Is them perfect? What are some things that misses or kind of elides from the conversation? Metrics are about educating the people consuming the metrics, about the reality of the rich data underneath. They're not about this perfect data set that shows everything. Starting with something mediocre, and the Dora metrics are really helpful for diagnosis. But if you have to, they can also be a good enough starting place to start reporting to your board or your CEO or to the other executives. And then you're like, oh, there's all these problems with them. Yes. There are all those problems with them, but that's this place you start and you educate people up from there to help them understand the nuances. And that's how they become more sophisticated understanding engineering, not by refusing to give them anything they can possibly measure.”

    2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “Specific. So people do like to see these metrics just like they see uptime metrics a lot. A lot of engineers report on like sprint points or stuff like that to their board, which is totally, totally fake thing to be reporting on. But people get some comfort on it. So my biggest thing here is when people measure things, this isn't an engineering only problem, but when people measure, they take on the perspective of an expert and they can tell you why not to measure everything. They can tell you why every measure is wrong or inaccurate. And they rule everything out. And so they measure nothing and they go to someone who's not an expert and like, well, actually, there's no accurate measure to give. They're not an expert is like, you don't know what you're really. And so you just have to get comfortable measuring something that's not perfect, but you can actually measure and reporting on it. And then the measure that's imperfect as people ask questions, that's like an opportunity to educate people on why the measure.”

    2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “So, one of the most influential books in the last decade in kind of software engineering leadership and kind of infrastructure is accelerate by Nicole Horsgren, Jean. Really, really phenomenal book, and it kind of comes up with these like four or four metrics. It comes up with lead time, it comes up with incident remediation time, it comes up with failure rate. And the fourth one of some sort. And there's at least 50 different startups out there that are selling you dashboards that kind of instrument these pieces of data. And they want you to just evaluate your team on them. The challenge is these are really good diagnosis metrics. And so, hey, our deployments are slow. Why is that? How do we speed them up? But your deployments being slow doesn't make you a good company or a bad company. It just tells you where you should focus on improving. It doesn't actually change how you are. And similarly, if your lead time is quick or slow, it tells you where you should invest or doesn't actually tell you if you should fire your engineers or something like that. That's way, way more details.”

    2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “Commit, show the number of meaningful, meaty things that have impact that you're doing, and you can explain the impact. People will kind of step back and give you space. If you can't populate that list, people will have concerns, and like, rightly so. They should be concerned about that.”

    2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “I think it's tricky. And what I've tried to do is basically two things one, aligning engineering evaluation to the business and product goals. So I want us to be wholly accountable to the product goals, not a, well, we did a good job products like screwing up over there. Obviously, a lot of companies find comfort doing that. But really, we're here to support the product, to support our customers in doing something interesting. We're not here to build novel systems unless it supports the customer and the product. And so first try to align heavily there. Second, I think just showing the roadmap of the valuable things we've done in the last six months is really powerful. Because I think sometimes people are like, I don't have anything to put there. And you're like, yeah, that's a real issue. Or if you have the kind of stuff to put there, that's great. And I really find that if you just”

    2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “Often you'll have more experience to analyze the complaints to figure out what kind of the contributing causes are to them. But yeah, if you just go talk to the team on an ongoing basis, you will know if they're effective or not. And you can go work to solve those specific problems. But again, you can't tell like your board. Oh, like, it's fine. I talk to the teams that they're good. My intuition's spot on. Because how do they know if your intuition is good or not? They're dealing with like a huge portfolio and some of their leaders are talking to you are good and some of them have terrible intuition. How do they actually assess?”

    2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “But, you know, this idea that if you just have the right benchmarks, like DCs won't judge you for spending too much in engineering, this doesn't actually help you get to the right place. It just helps you get your board to be less angry at you. Which is useful because it's hard to do good work when your board is angry at you, but it's not useful in the sense that it doesn't actually help you run your organization effectively. So then there's like the much harder immediate problem of how do you actually know if your R&D team or engineering team is effective. And what I find is a couple of things. First, if you're a good leader and you talk to the engineers, they will tell you the engineers know if their teams are effective or not. And if they're not, they'll also tell you why not. And their diagnosis can be wrong. But there's a crumb. You can start like picking up and you can trace the crumbs to figure out what's wrong.”

    2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “Engineers are trying to figure out how do we represent this? How do we prove that we're appropriately productive for the amount of headcount and funding that we have as an organization? And man, that's hard. And so the first way that people kind of focus on trying to answer these questions is just like benchmarking by like the amount of funding that you have. And that's pretty straightforward to do. It's a mechanical exercise. You look at like, you get a data set from your venture capital funds or whatnot. And you figure out like, okay, how much should we be spending in R&D? How much should we be spending in engineering? How much should we be sending on infrastructure engineering in R&D? And you can benchmark this all out and figure out what the correct numbers are there. The problem is this is a very mechanical and not very insightful driven way. It will get you a defensible answer. It's like the old no one gets fired for buying IBM, which definitely hasn't been true in my career ever.”

    2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “This is a question that's coming up even more, right? In the moment when we're kind of reducing a lot of the size of teams, when the industry, one of the venture capitalists that are on the board for these venture-backed companies are pushing on the efficiency of engineering.”

    2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “Understand, like, hey, you keep prioritizing this rewrite into a new programming language to me, that seems completely idiotic thing to be doing. Like, what's going on? And then once you understand, you might not agree with them, but at least you can have an honest conversation about how to navigate those constraints versus just like, man, you won't believe what my EM partner did today. Like Bozo did, like, blah, blah, blah. And having like sort of this victim villain kind of mindset about your peers.”

    2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “Think one of the biggest challenges I've historically seen, particularly in the last decade, is this idea that engineering managers have the job of giving their team interesting work. And I think that can put, you know, you often see this in like growth teams where the growth team is like, hey, we just need to do like a ton of experiments. And the engineer's like, I want to build something brand new. And the engine managers in between those try to figure out like, need to ship 50 experiments that are pretty boring and they want to do something brand new. I don't know how to solve this. And so it's a tricky moment. And GoodyMs kind of like find the way to balance. But that's like the biggest source of kind of ongoing friction where the EMs have been told why their teams they need to do something that the PMs just have no visibility into. And it makes the EM seem like totally unreliable partners because they're trying to solve these little bit of these invisible constraints. And that's where I think pushing further.”

    2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “You know, the role and the primacy of different functions in different companies varies so much that it's hard to have like a one size. You could also imagine where you want a staff engineer and that or not. And so I think very company specific. But yeah, I think design could absolutely be involved, particularly for like a design-led company like an Airbnb or something like that.”

    2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “Yeah, the incentives or shared now, which isn't perfect. It's still hard to balance them. They can still make the wrong trade-offs, but at least they understand the incentives are shared, which I think is a pretty powerful idea.”

    2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “The same. So, yeah, the head, our chief product officer, Bruce Ali and I spend a fair amount of time calibrating together and making sure, again, there's cases where there's like an exception because there's clear issues happening for someone. On average, that is what's happening. And I think people know that's what's happening because we've told them that. And I think that's pretty powerful.”

    2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “So, my biggest thing has been trying to force this idea that EMPM pairs are pairs and they generally have the same performance rating. And there's exceptions here, right? Like it could be the EM is Clearly not performing. And then it's not the PM's fault if the EM is like, you know, can't show up to work. Like the team doesn't respect them. Sometimes there's a clear non-performance, but generally hard situations are not situations where one person's obviously terrible. Those are easy to diagnose. Those are the easy ones. But in cases where there's two folks who seem to be pretty good, but just like the overall execution is not working out, I think this idea that same perf rating for both drives a level of one pain, but the right sort of perspective. And also, you know, something that I think Carter has experimented a little bit with over time, Henry, our CEO has a blog post about trifectas in doing that, but not just for EM and for PM, but also for the business leadership as well, where you all get graded at the same score based on your ability to”

    2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “You try to solve the conflict. It's like pushing to ship this feature, pushing to change the approach. Just make sure you actually understand what they care about. There is this idea that you have to make trade-offs and that there are tons of hard trade-offs to be made in kind of the field. But my experience is if you really deeply understand what everyone wants, there's usually like a compromise solution that gives everyone exactly what they want that doesn't take more time. Just have to be willing to dig deeper into it and understand the true needs for each party, which is often not what they're saying, by the way, which is part of the confusion.”

    2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “We're going to say yes to it because it's really important for me getting promoted or something like that. And is it ever this simple? It's really never that simple. People create simplistic narratives to find villains that they work with. There are no villains in the workplace. They're just people with like complex incentives that are doing complex things. But sometimes I talk to EMs who think like, oh, the product manager is just saying yes, they want to get promoted because the sales first end will review their promotion or something. The reality is never as simple. The reality is like the business needs to sell stuff to remain functioning. You can't just like say no and like have the business succeed. That doesn't work either. So one, understanding the incentives. The other piece, though, and I think this is the more common case or just the EM or the PM just don't understand the other person's needs and they start arguing before understanding. And so my biggest advice to both the EMs and the PMs, it's before”

    2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “The core problem in most of the EMPM peers that I've worked on, there's two core problems. So one, sometimes the incentives are misaligned. And that's hard to navigate. But if you can just be honest with each other and understand the incentives, sometimes you can find a compromise. But sometimes the EMs and PMs will be misaligned because their incentives are so far apart that there's no way to get to the bottom of it. And so this might be like timeline related or saying yes to sales related, where the engineer is like, hey, we definitely can't say yes to that. And the PMs are like,”

    2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “And if they do like that, that's like a them problem, right? Like it's like there are the internet's a big place with a lot of people and there are people who are going to be having like a really bad day when they encounter something you do. And they're going to be going to channel that anger at you or that frustration at you. But that's not about you. That's just like you happen to be there when they engage with it. You don't have to take that on. That's not your situation. It's okay”

    2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “Totally reasonable thing not to like, but I think what I can bring you is like my experience as an operator who's like actively learning and thinking through. I think that's really valuable to other operators in the industry. In terms of like giving you the perfect writing, like I try to do that closer to that. I don't know if I ever hit perfect writing. But that's where my books are. Like the books are taking a collection of thoughts over like a couple of years, cleaning them up a little bit, packaging them. They're way higher quality than my typical writing. But yeah, I would just publish. Publish a lot. Don't worry about the quality. Sometimes people will send you like silly feedback. And like, I just don't respond to that stuff anymore. And like, you know, you never know why people send you something like that. I think trying to debug people you don't know is like a bad use of time. It's just kind of like, thank you, move on to the next, like, don't even spend time worrying about it.”

    2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “My biggest advice would be just like just publish. And so there's a lot of people out there with stuff that hundreds of drafts have not published anything. And my thing is, I publish almost everything I write. If there's something that I'm not going to publish, I don't start writing it because I just have a quick check in my head. Like, is this something I can write and publish? And if my answer is like no, I just don't even start and my accuracy has gotten higher over time as a person more. But I published pretty much everything I write. That's why some of it's not that good. And that's okay. I'm like, again, like I want to write. I want to get these ideas out. I want to show what I'm focused on in my evolution as a thinker trying to learn how to operate in these different roles and these different companies. I'm not writing, trying to create like a polished perfect thing. And also I'm not writing to maximize the reader's experience of reading it. And some people don't like that. And I think that's like a...”

    2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

48. “Depends why people want to write. I tell people if you just want to write something that is going to help advance your career, you should really focus on writing two or three. If your goal is to write a lot consistently over time,”

    2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “One piece, but yeah, I've played around with my schedule a lot before I had a kid, often like Saturdays would be like the writing day. And so morning and early afternoon would just be like writing. I can't do that anymore. So now I mostly write at night, which is tricky from an energy management perspective. But the biggest thing I would say is just if you're actually excited about something, you will find time and energy for it. You're not excited about it, and it's 9 p.m., you're just going to get asleep. And so I really think this is where you have to schedule a little bit deliberately. But the first thing we talked about, our own energy management, like they really come together when your schedule gets tight, if you're not energized, you just won't get it done. And why would you? Like, it just doesn't make sense.”

    2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

50. “I think it's incredibly hard to find time to write about stuff that has nothing to do with your work. And it just distracts you from your work because these, you know, particularly if you're in a senior role, these can be pretty demanding jobs. But they're not demanding because you're responding to an urgent DM on Slack every five or six minutes. They're demanding because you need to make some really difficult decisions really well. And I think writing about like related topics is a great way to refine your thinking and improve your performance. It's not like a conflict or you do one either right or you do your job. Well, I think you can find a way to like align. And so a lot of podcasts folks do interviews with folks who are related to what they're thinking about at work. And that's a great way for them to learn, to build their network, to find their thinking, to test their thinking against experts in the field. It's not in conflict with the work. It's in alignment. So that's like.”

    2024-01-07 · Lenny's Podcast · The engineering mindset | Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source