[Software Engineering at Google] CH6 Leading at Scale

2 minute read

At the highest level, your job as a leader—either of a single team or a larger organization—is to guide people toward solving difficult, ambiguous problems
By ambiguous, we mean that the problem has no obvious solution and might even be unsolvable
There are three main steps to this process; First, you need to identify the blinders; next, you need to identify the trade-offs; and then you need to decide and iterate on a solution

Blinders are folks that have been steeped in the problem for so long that they’re wearing “blinders”—that is, they’re no longer able to see the forest

By definition, important and ambiguous problems do not have magic“silver bullet solutions, It’s your job to call out the trade-offs, explain them to everyone, and then help decide how to balance them

After you understand the trade-offs and how they work, use this information to make the best decision for this particular month
Next month, you might need to reevaluate and rebalance the trade-offs again; it’s an iterative process
You need to make your teams comfortable with iteration

It’s not just your job to solve an ambiguous problem, but to get your organization to solve it by itself, without you present

Again, there are three main parts to constructing this sort of self-sufficient group: dividing the problem space, delegating subproblems, and iterating as needed z
Always Be Scaling
As a leader, your most precious resource is your limited pool of time, attention, and energy

As you moved into leadership, though, you might have noticed that your main mode of work became less predictable and more about firefighting. That is, your job became less proactive and more reactive. The higher up in leadership you go, the more escalations you receive
If you let yourself slip into pure reactive mode (which happens almost automatically), you spend every moment of your life on urgent things, but almost none of those things are important in the big picture
Here are a few key techniques to force yourself to work mostly on important things
- Delegate
- Schedule dedicated time
- Find a tracking system that works

And so now, as you work through your tasks, do not try to tackle the top 80%—you’ll still end up overwhelmed and mostly working on urgent-but-not-important tasks
Instead, mindfully identify the balls that strictly fall in the top 20%—critical things that only you can do—and focus strictly on them

Always Be Deciding: Ambiguous problems have no magic answer; they’re all about finding the right trade-offs of the moment, and iterating
Always Be Leaving: Your job, as a leader, is to build an organization that automatically solves a class of ambiguous problems—over time—without you needing to be present
Always Be Scaling: Success generates more responsibility over time, and you must proactively manage the scaling of this work in order to protect your scarce resources of personal time, attention, and energy

[Software Engineering at Google] CH5 How to Lead a Team