The Engineering Manager

This month, we’re going to think about our teams, departments, and organisations as systems. Specifically, we’re going to consider how we can increase throughput and output by identifying and removing the biggest bottleneck at any given time. This might sound obvious, but it’s surprisingly rare in practice. Most leaders spread their effort across many initiatives simultaneously, making partial progress on everything and completing nothing. The insight we’ll explore is that systems don’t work that way: […]

This month, we’re going to continue exploring the mental models that Charlie Munger covered in Poor Charlie’s Almanack, a compendium of 11 talks given throughout his life. The book culminates in one final, bumper-sized talk that is a collection of over 20 mental models that he attributed to his success. Last month’s article covered one of these models: “invert, always invert”, which is a method for thinking about problems by flipping them on their head and considering […]