This book is a nice handbook on how to manage well… for everyone. The book is written for managers in larger companies or start-ups, but the lessons and lessons and tools are easily applicable to anyone. And I do mean applicable. The biggest advantage of the book is that it is very practical. A lot of books on management topics tend to be higher level, Will Larson gives you specific advice.This style shines when the author gives you a framework to work with.What stuck with me was his framework for project management and solving common problems with teams. I also admire his no-nonsense approach to strategy and vision. In his books, these documents sounded like something you really wanted to have, rather than documents full of corporate BS.
There are a lot of resources that the author recommends so if you are solving a specific problem it is a great place to start and then dig deeper into the recommended literature. I think this was the best 10 dollars I have spent in a long time.

Notes from the book

When I have a problem that I want to solve quickly and cheaply, I start thinking about process design. A problem I want to solve permanently and we have time to go slow? That’s a good time to evolve your culture. However, if process is too weak a force, and culture too slow, then organizational design lives between those two.

As I’ve gotten more exposure, I’ve come to believe that the fundamental challenge of organizational design is sizing teams.

ach time I’ve regretted it. To repeat: I have regretted it every single time. An important property of teams is that they abstract the complexities of the individuals that compose them. Teams with fewer than four individuals are a sufficiently leaky abstraction that they function indistinguishably from individuals. To reason about a small team’s delivery, you’ll have to know about each on-call shift, vacation, and interruption.

Teams should be six to eight during steady state. To create a new team, grow an existing team to eight to ten, and then bud into two teams of four or five. Never create empty teams. Never leave managers supporting more than eight individuals.

Most system-implemented systems are designed to support one to two orders’ magnitude of growth from the current load. Even systems designed for more growth tend to run into limitations within one to two orders of magnitude.

If your engineer is doing more than three interviews a week, it is a useful act of mercy to give them a month off every three or four months.

The key tools for leading efficient change are systems thinking, metrics, and vision.

As an aside, I’ve found that most aspects of running a successful technology migration overlap with good solution validation! This is a very general skill that will repay many times over the time you invest in learning it.

Strategies are grounded documents which explain the trade-offs and actions that will be taken to address a specific challenge. Visions are aspirational documents that enable individuals who don’t work closely together to make decisions that fit together cleanly.

important part of setting your goals is developing areas you’re less experienced in to maximize your global success, but it’s equally important to succeed locally within your current environment by prioritizing doing what you do well.

Every policy you write is a small strategy,1 built by identifying your goals and the constraints that bring actions into alignment with those goals.

partial work has no value,

Reward and status should derive from finishing high-quality work.

There is a lot less competition for hard work.

always change exactly one thing for each new project. Perhaps use a new database, a new web server, a different templating language, a static JavaScript front-end, whatever—but always change exactly one thing.