A "10x developer" isn't just a brilliant coder but a skilled person in an environment with zero organizational friction. By giving them total ownership, clarity, and trust to make decisions, you remove the blockers that bog down average developers in large companies, unlocking 10x productivity.

Inside Instagram, engineers frequently discussed a thought experiment: if half the company vanished, would things improve? They often concluded "yeah, maybe." This reveals a deep-seated belief among product builders that organizational bloat, communication overhead, and excessive code were creating more problems than the extra headcount was solving.

Near the launch of Instagram Stories, the team was in a bind after losing their drawing tools engineer. Co-founder and CTO Mike Krieger exemplified a "lead from the front" mentality by personally jumping in to code the remaining features, like the neon brush, and review diffs at 2 AM. This hands-on leadership from the top inspired the team.

As a junior IC at Instagram, Adrian was told leadership had "bigger fish to fry" than his A/B testing idea. He built a scrappy, functional prototype anyway, recruiting a PM for air cover. This bottoms-up initiative proved its value and ultimately led to his first senior promotion.

When the Instagram Stories project was churning, leadership made a counterintuitive move: they significantly cut the team size. This resulted in clearer ownership, less communication overhead, and faster decision-making, allowing a tiny core team to build and ship the massive feature in just a few months.

The fastest career acceleration comes from being inside a hyper-growth company, regardless of your initial title. The experience gained scaling a 'rocket ship' is far more valuable than a senior title at a slower-moving business. The speaker herself took a step down from Senior Director to an individual contributor role to join OpenAI.

For engineers working on user-facing features, the highest-leverage partnership isn't with a senior technical architect, but with a top-tier designer. Ryan Peterman's strategy was to become the go-to engineer for the best designers, allowing their exceptional product sense and vision to flow through his work, multiplying his own impact.

Mark Zuckerberg championed the idea that escalating a decision is a smart tool, not a failure. When teams are stuck, they shouldn't battle endlessly. Instead, they should go together to a leader with the power to make the call. This unblocks progress and saves huge amounts of time.

Despite building "Flex," a popular open-source iOS debugging tool later used internally at Facebook, Ryan Peterman's interviewers at Instagram showed no interest in it. They focused solely on algorithm questions, highlighting a disconnect between real-world impact and standardized hiring processes at large companies.