tl;dr:Will runs us through his "toolkit" to maintain technical quality, including prioritizing leverage points, establishing a technical quality team, and more. Underlying any approach is the philosophy to "start with something small, and iterate on it until it works."
tl;dr:"One of the most effective ways to get luckier is to be more visible within your organization." Will outlines ways to create internal and external visibility for yourself.
tl;dr:At Calm's monthly all-hands, Will was motivated to "boil each project down to a single well-formed metric that told the story: a target, a baseline, a trend and a timeframe."
tl;dr:Current best practices around D&I aren't necessarily impactful. Will believes the following result in genuine progress (1) Don’t tokenize others (2) Don’t center yourself (3) Don’t be comfortable, and focus on what actually works.
tl;dr:A Value Oasis is when a team's values misalign with the org's. This can be "messy," especially when the team's leader - who created the Oasis - is no longer present. An effective leader can use the "model, document and share” method to effect wider change within the organization.
tl;dr:Covers the following areas - priorities and goals, making the right system changes, tasks for the first 90 days, learning and building trust, building a support system, organizational health and process, hiring, execution & technology.
tl;dr:Prioritization is especially challenging for infrastructure engineers. Will presents his approach as Stripe scaled, discussing when to firefight, work on new features and more.
tl;dr:Code is "big ball of mud" at growth stage companies. Will describes a new approach to untangle it. "List all the beliefs you'd need to have to be confident in modifying your software" and see how they move up the behavior & property ladder, which he describes in detail.
tl;dr:Will focuses his career on growth and engagement, not equity & IPOs. He looks at it from a 40 year perspective, and how to maximize factors important to him - pace, people, prestige, profit and learning.
tl;dr:Larson shares his system for gauging size and state of engineering teams - ratios and frameworks to structuring team size, combining and spinning up teams, and assessing and accelerating team progress.