14 More lessons from 14 years at Google
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Fourteen lessons on team dynamics, decision-making, and organizational systems from 14 years at Google. Key insights include: prioritizing the right problems over saying yes to everything, making meetings actionable by defining clear decisions, converting intentions into specific commitments with owners and dates, treating
•12m read time• From addyo.substack.com
Table of contents
1. The best engineers pick the right problems to solve.2. If you can’t say what decision you’re asking for, you’re not ready for the meeting.3. “We should” is not a plan. “On Tuesday, I will” is a plan.4. Slow code is sometimes a symptom. Slow decisions are always a problem.5. Reliability is a product feature. Treat it like one.6. You can’t “communication” your way out of a bad interface between teams.7. The best escalation comes with a proposal.8. Avoid hero culture. Build systems that don’t require heroes.9. Make observability part of the feature.10. Small PRs are kindness. Especially if the PR is AI generated.11. When you add a team, you add edges, not just nodes.12. The migration is never just a migration13. AI makes drafts cheap. Taste becomes expensive.14. Trust is a latency optimization for teams.A final thoughtSort: