I recently listened to Molly Graham on Lenny Rachitsky’s podcast: “The high-growth handbook: Molly Graham’s frameworks for leading through chaos, change and scale”. If you don’t know her, she helped leaders at Google and Facebook during the hyper-growth years.
As a Head of Engineering, I hear a lot of management advice that sounds nice in theory and falls apart when real deadlines hit. Molly’s is different. Her frameworks track closely with my own experience, errors and learnings. It feels like she made the mistakes already so we don’t have to.
Below are the core concepts I pulled out of the podcast. I’ve written them up as a guide you can use.
Table of contents
Open Table of contents
Give Away Your Legos
At its heart, this is just a metaphor for delegation. If you want to grow as fast as your company, you have to stop doing the job you just got good at. Hand it off to someone else and find a new, messy problem to solve.
You have to grow as fast as your company is growing if you really want to take advantage… learning to give away what you’ve gotten good at and move on to the next shiny pile of Legos.
Think of it like owning part of the codebase. You built the authentication system. You’re the only one who really understands it. Now the company needs billing and you have to hand off auth to a new hire - even if they’ll make mistakes at first - so you can go build billing.
If you refuse to let go of what you wrote because you don’t trust others to touch it, you become the bottleneck.
In engineering, this means constantly documenting and delegating your previous technical responsibilities so you can tackle higher-level architectural or organizational work.
Delegating everything immediately is hard. You have to build trust with your reports first. You can’t simply hand a core system to someone you’ve never worked with - that’s mentally challenging. I’d stress out about it and end up helicoptering, causing us both to fail. What works for me: delegate small things first. Get a read on their capabilities and their operating patterns. Once the trust is there, hand over the big Legos.
The flip side shows up with veteran leaders. Someone who built a critical product, knows all the details and verbally says they want others to own parts of it - but in practice fights for every pull request. Back-and-forth. Defensive comments. Small conflicts that add up.
They say they want help. Emotionally, they haven’t let go of the Legos. Progress halts because the team is negotiating for permission to contribute.
Not everyone can give the Legos away. And when they can’t, it creates real hurdles.
Bob the Monster
Change creates fear, ego and territorialism. Molly suggests externalizing those feelings into a monster named Bob. Bob’s job is to make you the worst version of yourself.
Anything that lasts longer than two weeks is actually something you should pay attention to.
If the feeling fades in a few days, it was Bob acting up.
Bob is the voice telling you to send a rage Slack message at 9:00 PM because you got layered or someone changed your roadmap. Don’t send the message. Let the wave roll through. If you’re still angry about the same issue two weeks later, it’s a real problem.
This is the area where I struggle the most. I’ve been told I have trouble with emotional intelligence because I react quickly - and not always positively - to change. My monster feels less like Bob and more like a hydra.
To cope, I count to 20 in my head before responding. Sometimes I say “let me circle back” to buy time. I take notes - digital and on paper - and review them later. That retrospective is where I figure out what actually triggered me and whether the issue is worth energy or was just the monster reacting.
J-Curve vs Stairs
Most people view careers as stairs - predictable, linear promotions. Boring. The J-Curve is scarier. You jump off a cliff (take a new, hard role), you fall for a while (feel incompetent, imposter syndrome) and then you climb out higher than the stairs would have ever taken you.
The much more fun careers are like jumping off cliffs and you do fall, but then you climb out way beyond where the stairs could ever get you.
This requires embracing the Professional Idiot phase. When you take a role you’re not qualified for, you will feel stupid for about six months. Ask the dumb questions. That’s how the learning unlocks.
If you feel comfortable, you’re probably not on a J-Curve.
I approached this differently about three times in my career. I didn’t just jump roles within the same company - I grew into higher roles across multiple companies and then deliberately jumped down to an IC role at a new one. I relearned how to operate, grow and lead from that perspective. It felt extreme. I made plenty of failures. It also gave me multiple perspectives and expanded my network.
You can apply this without changing jobs. The Toyota principle genchi genbutsu - “go and see” - works here. Go down and see how people under you operate day to day. Do the job with them. Delegate a day of your management work and focus on what your ICs actually do. It often shows you why you’re comfortable in your current role and where the hidden problems sit.
The Waterline Model
Snorkel before you scuba.
When a team is struggling, the instinct is to blame the people - deep underwater. Usually the problem is structural, right at the surface.
80% of problems on teams actually happen because of structural issues… Your only goal as a manager… is clear roles and clear expectations.
Before fixing interpersonal relationships or individual psychology, check the basics:
- Structure: Do they know their goals? Do they know their roles?
- Dynamics: How are decisions made? How are meetings run?
- Interpersonal: Then look at relationships
- Intrapersonal: Finally look at individual psychology
When I joined Stay22 as Head of Engineering, I saw this play out. The goal was to help the org deliver impact faster while scaling. We didn’t have career ladders or clear role definitions. I started at the structural level. Built career ladders with clear progression. Re-evaluated all engineers against them. Introduced performance reviews and peer feedback.
We doubled the team in a year. The clear structure kept us aligned through the new challenges.
I also addressed Dynamics - transformed our documentation culture, introduced scalable ADRs (now over 1,000 articles), refined our meeting structures. Now I’m implementing weekly engineering reviews to keep alignment on goals and incidents.
Defining structure and decision processes solved the bulk of our communication and focus issues. Interpersonal and intrapersonal work is still there - it’s a TODO on a stable foundation, not a crisis.
6 Rules for Creating Goals
Goals are communication tools. If they don’t create clarity, they’re useless. Molly’s rules are strict to prevent goal creep.
- Max 3 Goals. Even Facebook only had three (Growth, Engagement, Revenue).
- One Goal Wins. If two goals conflict, you need to know which one matters more.
- Explain to a 5-Year-Old. If an intern doesn’t understand it, rewrite it. No complex spreadsheets.
- Strategy Should Hurt. If you aren’t making painful trade-offs, you aren’t prioritizing.
- One Goal, One Owner. Shared ownership means no ownership.
- Goals ≠ Enough. You need a process to track them.
When I heard this part I laughed out of confusion, because at Stay22 we definitely have more than three goals. A year ago it was worse.
Today, our CEO created an OKR framework with four sections, each with a theme and multiple goals inside. We struggle with the rules Molly mentioned - some goals have multiple owners, others stretch across multiple departments, the process always feels rushed. Tracking is its own comedy: we switched tools once, planning to switch again.
The positive side: we’re iterating. We learn from each rushed cycle, tweak the process, test new changes. We aren’t there yet. The willingness to iterate is our current strength.
Leading Through Change: the “I Don’t Know” rule
Leaders often fake confidence because they think they need all the answers. In high-growth environments, that’s dangerous.
Your job as manager and a leader is not to have all the answers. It is to get good at finding them.
Stop faking it. When asked a tough question, say: “I don’t know. Who should we ask? How can we learn this? Let’s figure it out”. It builds more trust than a made-up answer.
This is the topic leaders and ICs struggle with the most. You have to learn early in your career to say, “I don’t know, but I’ll find out”. I picked up the skill in school and university, where they taught us how to search for answers, not just how to memorize them.
Remember being a kid and thinking you knew everything? Growing up opens your eyes to how much you don’t. Same in leadership. Even if you know the answer, it’s sometimes worth pausing. Is it useful to say “Yes, I know”? Or better to say, “I don’t know right now - let me double-check and come back”? Often the latter builds more confidence and accuracy.
Don’t Promise What You Can’t Control
Avoid promising titles, long-term roles or stability just to close a candidate.
Do not promise things that you can’t control… There is literally no faster way to demoralize high performers than going back on a promise.
Don’t tell a new hire they’ll be the “Manager of X” forever. In a scaling company, you can’t guarantee that. Be honest about the chaos.
It’s better to be tough and say no or “it won’t happen”, and deal with the upset immediately. I’ve had many such moments in my career. The lesson was the same each time. Don’t promise what isn’t in your control. Say no and then work on how to convert that no into a yes down the road.
Hiring vs. Firing
We obsess over hiring. Firing is just as critical. Even great managers only get hiring right about 50% of the time. Keeping the wrong people creates barnacles that slow the ship down.
Firing people is as important as hiring people… Getting good at identifying when someone does not belong… is actually a skill.
Recognize quickly when a hire isn’t working. Removing the drag on the team is better than letting it fester out of politeness.
I’ve built a personal framework for recognizing patterns during hiring and the first three months of probation. Define what matters for your org and the culture you’re building - that clarity helps you spot Great, Good and Bad fits fast. Blink by Malcolm Gladwell is a useful read if you want to start building that pattern-recognition skill.
Serve the Business, Not the People
Sounds harsh. It provides clarity. When making hard decisions - layoffs, reorgs - ask what the business needs, not what will make people happy. If the business wins, eventually everyone wins.
Serve the business, not the people… The answer is always what’s the right thing for the business.
Use this mental tool: “If there were no emotions involved, what would I do?” Make the decision based on that, then execute with as much kindness as possible.
A business isn’t a family. It’s a sports team competing against other teams. Remember it.
Focus on High Performers
Managers default to spending 80% of their time on struggling employees. You get better returns by investing in your best people.
High performers are actually the future of your company… I run experiments… I’m going to see if they can do this with less guidance.
Give your best engineer a project that feels slightly too big for them. Remove oversight. Test their ceiling.
I’ve applied this many times. It’s a key driver for building delegation habits and trust. High performers raise the culture. Low performers either leave or catch up.
Make sure every team has at least one high-performing IC. Identify them early and build a relationship. You support them. They support you.
Final Thought
Scaling a team and a product is never a straight line. It’s messy, emotional and often feels like you’re failing even when you’re succeeding.
The one thing I’ve learned is that we don’t need all the answers. We need the right tools and the courage to find those answers together.
These frameworks aren’t silver bullets. They’re a compass. When the chaos hits - and it will - come back and read the handbook. Manage your monster. Delegate. Focus on what matters.
We’re building something incredible at Stay22. The growth, painful as it is, is the proof.
Back to work.