Book Review: “An Elegant Puzzle” by Will Larson

Will Larson, Head of Foundation Engineering at Stripe (and previously at Digg, SocialCode, and Uber), has written an incredibly practical guide for engineering leaders. The book is easy to handle, clear to navigate, and packed with real-world insights—no fluff, just actionable advice.

• Scale engineering teams quickly without losing control over technical debt.
• Streamline your hiring process, from building the recruitment pipeline to onboarding new hires.
• Clearly define and communicate strategy and vision for your teams.
• Choose effective meeting rhythms and tools for team sync-ups and one-on-one meetings.
• Develop a healthy and productive team culture.
• Focus your efforts as an engineering leader effectively.
• Advance your own management career.
• Support career growth for your direct reports.
• Implement a fair, transparent performance evaluation system.

Managers should ideally oversee 6–8 engineers.
Managers of managers should have around 4–6 direct reports.

Overloaded
Symptoms: Backlog constantly grows, team effort is high but productivity low.
Solution: Quickly hire more engineers before progress stalls.

Treading Water
Symptoms: Routine tasks get done, but no headway on technical debt or new projects.
Solution: Reduce work-in-progress (WIP) to help teams focus and finish high-priority tasks faster, then address tech debt.

Paying Down Debt
Symptoms: Addressing technical debt reveals even more issues.
Solution: Allow extra time and patience to systematically resolve tech debt.

Innovating Effectively
Symptoms: Technical debt is manageable, morale is high, productivity is excellent.
Solution: Avoid overloading the team; keep enough capacity to maintain quality and delay new technical debt.

• Hire for one team at a time—adding new members can disrupt team cohesion, so stagger hiring across squads.
• Adjust team scope rather than shuffling engineers between teams to preserve stability.
• Realistic Productivity Expectations
• When your engineering team doubles every six months:
• Senior engineers spend approximately 10 hours/week mentoring each junior hire, significantly reducing their productivity.
• Hiring duties consume about 4 hours/week per senior engineer, further reducing their output.
• Each significant increase in team size typically requires another management layer.
• Productivity per engineer can drop significantly due to increased communication overhead, incident handling, and operational responsibilities.

Risk Reduction
Begin by creating migration documentation iteratively.
First, migrate two critical teams to catch edge cases early.

Bulk Migration
Automate approximately 90% of migrations with clear documentation and tools.
Guide teams individually through the migration process.

Completion
Ensure complete adoption, manually handling remaining migrations.
Phase out the old system entirely.

These insights represent just a fraction of what Larson offers—the entire book is well worth your time.

“One of my favorite engineering management books. It’s concise, practical, and full of insightful principles, not just recipes.”— Sebastian Gebski, Goodreads

“Unlike many management books, this one delivers actionable value. Essential reading for any manager, in or out of tech.”— Simon NINON, Amazon

“Excellent appendix with valuable resources and advice on executive presentations and handling media interactions.”— Vicki, Goodreads

“The most practical book on engineering management at high-growth tech companies I've ever read—long overdue.”— The Pragmatic Engineer