An Elegant Puzzle 📘
Our review + summary of the famous book by Will Larson about Engineering Management.
Hey there! This is a Book Edition 📚 — where I publish our review + summary of a famous non-fiction book in our space.
It is made possible by the book club in the community, where every two months we decide on a non-fiction book to read, and we review it together in a live event at the end of the period.
Over the last two months we have read An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management, by Will Larson, who is simply one of my favorite authors.
Will is CTO at Carta, ex-CTO at Calm, ex-Stripe and Uber — but most of all, for me, he is the author of countless, fantastic essays on Lethain.com, which I have often quoted and referenced on Refactoring.
An Elegant Puzzle itself is a collection of such articles, loosely organized into five main sections. The anthological nature of the book is important, because it makes it extremely different from other works you may have read in this space.
In fact, An Elegant Puzzle is probably, at once, the most interesting book about engineering management I have ever read, and also the hardest to read — for reasons I will explain.
It is also equally hard to summarize.
In most business books you can find a few, seminal ideas, which you can explain at a basic level in just a few sentences, and which are continuously explored throughout the book in increasing detail. Think of:
You can’t do this with An Elegant Puzzle.
This is an extraordinarily dense work, where basically nothing is ever repeated twice. If you had to find a common thread, you won’t find it in a specific topic, but more in the spirit of how such a wide range of problems are addressed.
In this review, I will try to capture this spirit; I will give you an overview of the book's main themes, and will comment on a few that were particularly interesting to me.
Here is our agenda for today:
🧩 Systems thinking — the true heart of the book.
📗 Book structure — how the work is organized, and what you will find in it.
🚀 Growth & hypergrowth — a both visible and invisible thread that runs through most of Will’s thinking.
🏢 Big vs small tech — reflecting on the ideal recipients of the book.
📌 Bottom line — my parting thoughts.
Let’s dive in!
🧩 Systems thinking
The second chapter of the book is called Tools, and it opens with a small essay about systems thinking. In my opinion this is the true heart of An Elegant Puzzle, and, if you ask me, it should have opened with it.
Systems thinking is a wildly overused term, but Will gives a very precise definition for it. Systems are combinations of stocks and flows:
🧱 Stocks — are accumulations of resources.
🔀 Flows — are streams that make stocks increase (inflows) or decrease (outflows).
This definition looks extremely simple and, in fact, through the use of diagrams, it turns systems into equally simple boxes and arrows.
Such apparent simplicity is part of the reason why, I suspect, many people feel somewhat authorized to give systems thinking a loose interpretation. Simple, though, doesn’t mean vague — on the contrary, stocks and flows are precise ideas that, applied well, can model infinitely sophisticated situations.
One of the examples provided is about DORA metrics. The four metrics are flows that impact their respective stocks, and together model the software delivery process as a clear, predictable system.
Now, thinking of your dev process as a system is still intuitive, or at least it should be, to managers and engineers who have been in the industry for more than a few years.
An Elegant Puzzle, though, applies this line of thinking to everything.
It addresses otherwise nebulous themes like team organization, culture, hiring, or hypergrowth, by uncovering their inner logic and creating mini frameworks that always feel grounded and actionable.
This is extraordinarily useful. In Will’s own words 👇
Once you start thinking about systems, you’ll find it’s hard to stop. Pretty much any difficult problem is worth trying to represent as a system, and even without numbers plugged in I find them powerful thinking aids.
So, “An Elegant Puzzle” may look like an obscure title for an engineering management book, but it all makes sense when you understand Will’s approach to problems. Engineering management’s challenges are explained as a series of puzzles which you have to solve by creating systems for them.
📗 Book structure
As anticipated, the book is a collection of essays. For the most part, each essay focuses on a single problem and works well in isolation, similarly to a Refactoring article (I hope!).
The essays are organized into five sections: