Business · Book club
An Elegant Puzzle book club questions
Here are 11 book club questions for An Elegant Puzzle by Will Larson, ordered to open easily and end somewhere worth arguing about. Copy them, print them, or bring them up one at a time.
An Elegant Puzzle is Will Larson's guide to the craft of engineering management, written from his experience leading engineering teams at Digg, Uber, and Stripe.
Will Larson · 2019 · 4h 15m
Full summary and key takeaways →The 11 questions
- 1.
Larson describes four team states. Which state is your team in right now? What's the evidence?
- 2.
Have you ever added headcount to a struggling team and watched it slow down before it sped up? What was happening that made more people not the answer in the short term?
- 3.
What's a coordination cost your organization currently pays that better team structure could eliminate? Who would need to make that structural decision?
- 4.
Larson says writing is leverage. How much of your management thinking lives in documents versus in your head or in conversations? What are the risks of the current ratio?
- 5.
Think about the last migration or platform shift your team attempted. Did it provide value at each step, or did it require a long commitment before anyone saw a return? What happened?
- 6.
Where do you see the biggest gap in your organization between what it says it values and what it actually rewards?
- 7.
Larson is skeptical of org chart changes as a fix for coordination problems. When is a reorg actually the right answer versus a distraction from harder problems?
- 8.
What does the IC track look like in your organization? Is it a genuine alternative to management, or a slower path to less influence?
- 9.
Which technical debt in your system is load-bearing — things everyone knows are fragile but that nobody is fixing because they're working? What would it take to create space to address it?
- 10.
Larson writes about making decisions that travel without you. What's the last significant decision you made that your team understood well enough to extend and apply without asking you?
- 11.
How do you decide when a problem is worth solving elegantly versus solving quickly and messily? What factors change your answer?
How to run the discussion
- Pick six to eight, not all of them. An hour of real discussion covers fewer questions than anyone expects, and racing the list is what makes a book club feel like homework.
- Open with what people noticed, not what they concluded. Asking for a verdict first hardens opinions before anyone has heard each other.
- Let the disagreement run. The questions below that split a room are the ones worth the time; the ones everyone answers the same way can be skipped.
- Ask the quiet person a specific question. A direct, narrow question is far easier to answer than an open invitation to contribute.
Themes worth steering toward
If the conversation stalls, these are the threads that usually restart it.
Common questions
What are good book club questions for An Elegant Puzzle?
Here are 11 book club questions for An Elegant Puzzle by Will Larson, ordered to open easily and end somewhere worth arguing about. The strongest openers ask what each reader noticed rather than what they concluded, and the discussion usually turns on engineering management, organizational design, career growth.
How long should a book club discussion of An Elegant Puzzle last?
Most groups run 60 to 90 minutes of actual discussion. That is roughly six to eight questions, not all of them, so pick the ones that suit your group rather than working down the list in order.
What are the main themes in An Elegant Puzzle?
Engineering management, Organizational design, Career growth, Team health, Systems thinking. Those are the threads most likely to divide a room, which makes them the useful places to steer a discussion that has gone quiet.
Picking the next one? See books like An Elegant Puzzle or questions for other book club picks.
