Stanford Tech Talk on The Power of Leverage: How Quip’s Small Engineering Team Built a Product on 8 Different Platforms

by Edmond Lau

What investments have engineering leaders made at top tech companies like Google, Facebook, Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe, and Instagram that provided the highest returns for their teams?

What enabled the engineering team at Quip to ship its productivity tools to 8 different platforms with only 13 engineers?

How do the most effective engineers make their efforts, their teams, and their careers more successful?

Recently, I had the opportunity to share some of the stories and insights behind these questions at a talk on the Stanford campus. The Stanford ACM 1 organization invited me to speak with college students and engineers in the area. Even though the live event was oversubscribed, Richard Chen graciously recorded the talk, so I’m excited to share the video with you as well.

In this talk, you’ll learn the key framework that effective engineers use to maximize their impact — a framework that took me years to learn through trial and error. You’ll hear about early adventures from Quip — a company’s whose documents, spreadsheets, task lists, and team chat product powers thousands of companies including Facebook, Pinterest, Quora, Stripe, Salesforce, Instagram, and more. It’s an excellent case study that illustrates powerful techniques you too can use with your teams.

And you’ll hear stories from VPs, directors, managers, and other leaders I interviewed during my two-year quest of writing The Effective Engineer.

Enjoy the talk, and let me know which lessons most resonate with your own experience.

Level Up Your Engineering Impact

If you’d like to go more in-depth into the concepts discussed in the talk, get your own copy of The Effective Engineer today. It’s the one manual recommended by engineering VPs, managers, and senior engineers from Facebook, Twitter, Google, Dropbox, Box, and more.

Plus, now you can also get:

  • In-depth podcast interviews with engineering leaders at top tech companies;
  • A tactical toolkit of strategies, checklists, and questions to help you excel at the most common engineering activities;
  • Advanced mastery videos of powerful techniques that I’ve only taught at workshops at Google, Pinterest, and other companies;
  • And more.

What are you waiting for? Master the strategies and techniques that great engineers use to amplify their impact.

Posted:

“A comprehensive tour of our industry's collective wisdom written with clarity.”

— Jack Heart, Engineering Manager at Asana

“Edmond managed to distill his decade of engineering experience into crystal-clear best practices.”

— Daniel Peng, Senior Staff Engineer at Google

“A comprehensive tour of our industry's collective wisdom written with clarity.”

— Jack Heart, Engineering Manager at Asana

“Edmond managed to distill his decade of engineering experience into crystal-clear best practices.”

— Daniel Peng, Senior Staff Engineer at Google

Grow Your Skills Beyond the Book

Listen to podcast interviews with top software engineers and watch master-level videos of techniques previously taught only in workshops and seminars.

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