The Engineering Mindset by Lenny's Podcast

There’s always a strategy. Sometimes it’s bad, but there’s always one. The first rule of strategy is that if you write it down, then you can improve it.

Boring strategies focus people’s energy on the problems we value as a company… the goal of good strategy is to dictate how we invest the limited capacity we have into the problems we care about.

Examples: Stripe’s Ruby monolith, Uber running its own data centres. Engineers hated both, but the constraint did the focusing. The failure mode: “almost all bad strategies come down from a willful disbelief of the accurate diagnosis.”

I publish pretty much everything I write. That’s why some of it’s not that good. And that’s okay… I’m not writing to create a polished, perfect thing. What I can bring you is my experience as an operator who’s actively learning and thinking through — that’s really valuable to other operators.

Sometimes people will send you silly feedback… trying to debug people you don’t know is a bad use of time. Just: thank you, move on to the next.

At the start, it’s important not to worry so much about quality, publish first, you’re proving that you can do it consistently.

Then, once keeping the volume up becomes easy, the barometer moves to quality again. But don’t let it dissuade you into the perfectionism trap because often times we are bad indicators of quality ourselves.