Will Larson

Sustainable writing is driven by personal energy and curiosity rather than external deadlines or financial incentives.

"I feel really strongly that you can write a lot more if you write what you want to write... the biggest strength of writing what you want is you get to write where there's energy and you don't have to..."

To build a long-term writing habit, prioritize publishing frequently over achieving perfect quality.

"If your goal is to write a lot consistently over time, my biggest advice would be just publish. And so there's a lot of people out there with stuff that hundreds of drafts and they've not published an..."

A written strategy is essential for organizational alignment and provides a baseline that can be critiqued and improved.

"The first rule of strategy is that if you write it down, then you can improve it. If it's not written down, it's hard to say if this PM is just not a good PM or if they're trying to apply the strategy..."

Boring strategies that enforce technical constraints allow teams to focus their limited energy on solving core product problems rather than tooling.

"A common strategy that's really good but very boring is we only use the tools we have today. So a lot of times you'll get engineers that want to introduce new programming languages, new databases, new..."

Full system rewrites are extremely high-risk and rarely succeed as intended, often leading to significant downtime and business instability.

"The decision that was done... they needed to do a complete rewrite in order to get there. This is a decision that never works out for anyone... We try to bring the site up and just keeps crashing. And..."

High-volume interviewing leads to cognitive fatigue and poor data retention, making it difficult to evaluate candidates accurately.

"When I was at Uber, some days I would do six interviews back to back. I would just be in a conference room and at some point you can't even remember who you're talking to because you talk to so many p..."

High-performing cultures treat engineers as business peers and adults by involving them in real, difficult problems rather than sheltering them.

"I think that we often treat engineers a little bit like children instead of giving them the responsibilities and ability to actually thrive as adults. And so like, 'Oh, the engineers won't want to do..."

Effective team values must be honest reflections of current behavior, applicable to daily decisions, and reversible (not just generic platitudes).

"I think of these as identity values. These are really just you describing who you want to be... Is it honest? Is it applicable? And can you reverse it? And if not, it's probably actually not helping t..."

Most decisions are not as critical as they feel in the moment; use the 'six-month rule' to calibrate the time spent on them.

"Will anyone remember what we decided in six months? Because I think people stress out about a lot of decisions, but I increasingly believe most decisions people stress out about just aren't that impor..."

Effective collaboration between engineering and product requires deep empathy for the other's constraints before attempting to resolve conflicts.

"My biggest advice to both the EMs and the PMs, is before 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 w..."

Shared performance ratings for EM/PM pairs force alignment on business outcomes rather than functional silos.

"I think this idea that same perf rating for both drives a level of one pain, but the right perspective... you all get graded the same score based on your ability to evaluate and solve for the entire s..."

The guest provides a detailed framework for modeling reality using 'stocks and flows' and applies it specifically to business processes like hiring pipelines.

"Systems thinking is basically you try to think about stocks and flows. So stocks are things that accumulate and flows are kind of the movement from a stock to another thing."