An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

By: Will Larson

Narrated by: Tiffany Morgan

There's a saying that people don't leave companies, they leave managers. Management is a key part of any organization, yet the discipline is often self-taught and unstructured. Getting to the good solutions of complex management challenges can make the difference between fulfillment and frustration for teams, and, ultimately, the success or failure of companies.

Will Larson's An Elegant Puzzle orients around the particular challenges of engineering management - from sizing teams to technical debt to succession planning - and provides a path to the good solutions. Drawing from his experience at Digg, Uber, and Stripe, Will Larson has developed a thoughtful approach to engineering management that leaders of all levels at companies of all sizes can apply. An Elegant Puzzle balances structured principles and human-centric thinking to help any leader create more effective and rewarding organizations for engineers to thrive in.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2019 Stripe Press (P)2019 Stripe Press

Worth your time.

This book has a great explanation of real world experience and contains additional (free) resources to continue learning about the subject matter.

Some good points

This was an interesting book in that it is the author’s experience and observations, not any case studies or experiments. It did have some interesting points, but then went downhill for me. It covered a very wide variety of work topics - the points were logical, but without any case studies to back them up. The points became more ‘stating the obvious’ as it went, but still reasonable to review.

Lots of useful references

Not only a bullet list of URLs, each reference is abstracted and commented by the autor pointing out his key takeaways.

Good overview of best practices

Working in a large tech company I found nearly everything mentioned was something that is being followed at the company. I believe this book is in line with current tech best practices, but I wish it went into more depth. There was a lack of data on most of the statements.

Grow organization as Engineering Manager

It is not another leadership book, but more how to build and grow organization and what kind of challenges you can face as engineering manager, and how to deal with them.
Great source information and inspiration.

lacks a human connection

Very robotic and disconnected leadership technique. The author focuses exclusively on structural leadership and influence and omits personal and social leadership techniques. B on structural and business strategy. D+ on emotional intelligence.

Poor table of contents in the audio book

Love the content, however the table of contents of the audio book is useless. It would have been a lot more useful if it has chapter titles and sub chapters

Great content, terrible narration

Great content, but narration - monotonous, mechanical, robotic, incorrect pronunciation of software terms, on a plus side - forces you to buy a print edition

Something is wrong with the narrator

Even my husband and 12-year-old son complained about the intonation and the style of narration. Interestingly, she suddenly gets better in chapter 5 (chapter 8 in Audible). Maybe the first half of the book is actually narrated a by voice model based on the real narrator?

Useful, but quite rigid

The book certainly contains lots of useful advice to new leaders. It just seems like a very one-size-fits-all attitude, that does not resonate well woth me.