# Use competing designs to make large projects easier to scope

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/use-competing-designs-to-make-large-projects-easier-to-scope/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Boris Cherny](https://realalpha.app/builders/boris-cherny/) · Boris Cherny is Creator of Claude Code and former Meta principal engineer. · Created Claude Code at Anthropic and leads its team; previously spent about five years at Meta.
- Host: [Ryan Peterman](https://realalpha.app/people/ryan-peterman/) · Host, The Peterman Pod · Went from new grad to staff engineer at Instagram in three years.
- Show: The Peterman Pod
- Episode: [Boris Cherny (Creator of Claude Code) On What Grew His Career And Building at Anthropic](https://realalpha.app/v/AmdLVWMdjOk/), Dec 15, 2025
- Moment: 29:37 to 35:38 of the episode (6 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/use-competing-designs-to-make-large-projects-easier-to-scope/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/AmdLVWMdjOk/?t=1777

## Quote

> “I think the biggest failure mode that I've seen is people just **taking too long** and getting too into the weeds.”
> — [Boris Cherny](https://realalpha.app/builders/boris-cherny/) at [34:30](https://realalpha.app/v/AmdLVWMdjOk/?t=2070) · The Peterman Pod

## Takeaways

1. Start with a rough scope instead of getting lost in details.
2. Parallel designs can reveal shared solutions and isolate risks.
3. Time-box scoping and ask experts to critique a straw man.

## About this segment

Boris Cherny describes scoping work for hundreds of engineers and using parallel design teams to expose risks and align on a plan. He advises time-boxing estimates and bringing experts a straw man.

From “Boris Cherny (Creator of Claude Code) On What Grew His Career And Building at Anthropic”, Dec 15, 2025. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/AmdLVWMdjOk/)

## Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

[29:41](https://realalpha.app/v/AmdLVWMdjOk/?t=1781) lead or Uber tech lead. And I think you had a few stories where you scoped out work for hundreds of engineers and just thinking about how do you do that if there's so much to scope and you know you're one person how do you go about doing such massive scoping requests for leadership yeah this was a totally insane time so i worked a lot with uh tina shachman who's uh she she's now a microsoft um but she was she was my manager at the time and then uh yifei who's who's my manager after and there was a lot more investment going into facebook groups at the time so i think the org was maybe 150 or 200 people when i joined and by the time i left to instagram i think it was like 600 or 800 people something like that so there's this feeling from zuck that facebook apps should be all about communities and he just wanted us to go like faster and faster to make

[30:34](https://realalpha.app/v/AmdLVWMdjOk/?t=1834) that a reality and you know as an executive your kind of biggest way to do that is to put the right people in charge of decisions and then uh to give them resources and so like in you know in the case of meta it's it's just engineers um you don't need like gpus for this you need like engineers to do stuff and so we pitched this project to uh to zuck and it was called communities as the new organizations that was like the internal name and uh he grin with just like a bunch of headcount to go towards this and so we just had to figure out what these people will do and you know for him i i get it it's like if the thing is important you got to put a bunch of people on it in hindsight what i would have done differently is i i would have put way less people on it because what matters is like solving people's problems

[31:15](https://realalpha.app/v/AmdLVWMdjOk/?t=1875) and building awesome product. And this actually has to kind of be bottoms up and you kind of want to like slowly dial this up as you find product market fit for new product lines. You can't just do it all at once. And yeah, we just had to like scope out all the stuff. Like there were weeks where I had to, you know, do like a scoping doc for like, okay, we're going to put 30 engineers on this. Here's like three technical options.

[31:36](https://realalpha.app/v/AmdLVWMdjOk/?t=1896) We're going to pick this one. Next project. We're going to put 20 engineers on this. Here's three options. We're going to pick this one. Next project we're going to do. And just like doing this like over and over again, just to have some sort of confidence that this thing isn't totally crazy. We did some baseline technical scoping, roughly matching the number of engineers to the project. And there's actually some pretty fun stuff.

[31:55](https://realalpha.app/v/AmdLVWMdjOk/?t=1915) I remember we were trying to merge Facebook groups and pages at some point. like in the data model side. And this was this like very gnarly migration. It would have been, you know, to fully do it, this is like many years and like probably hundreds of engineers to fully do it. Because you have to do it across like the data model, the product layer, integrity systems, ad systems. There's just all sorts of stuff that has to get merged.

[32:17](https://realalpha.app/v/AmdLVWMdjOk/?t=1937) And at the time, Yosef Karver, he just joined, I think he came from either Profile or Events, like a different org that joined forces with groups to make this happen. And he was working on it, But he was kind of struggling with a decision at the time. And I think he was even more senior than I was. But he just wasn't making the decision on the data model. And so I just took a bunch of people and I was like, all right, all the tech leads across the entire org, we're going to spend the next three hours on this day.

[32:44](https://realalpha.app/v/AmdLVWMdjOk/?t=1964) And we're going to do this essentially game where we get to do architecture. And so I split everyone up into two teams. I think it was blue team and green team. I forget what these were. And we gave everyone this problem of how do you merge these data models? Here are the requirements. And then everyone had three hours in a whiteboard and they had to come up with a design. And what was cool is that going into it, we had no idea how we would do this because it just seemed too crazy of a problem.

[33:09](https://realalpha.app/v/AmdLVWMdjOk/?t=1989) But the going out of it, we had two designs that were 80% the same. And so it was really obvious what we could execute on. And then the 20% where the differences were, it was very obvious where the risk was. And so we could kind of front load a little bit of that risk with a little bit of technical spikes. but also we can just start execution right away because we knew exactly what we had to do. Yeah, that was really interesting when I saw that. It was like a technical design competition with all the senior engineers and you just put people in separate rooms to come up with.

[33:41](https://realalpha.app/v/AmdLVWMdjOk/?t=2021) I've never heard anything like that. When you proposed that idea for this design competition within the org, were people excited about it or was it like kind of a crazy idea? Yeah, it was sort of crazy. I mean, with this sort of thing, you just have to kind of do it. So I just I just kind of told everyone hey we're doing this and then I just put it on everyone's calendar and it just seems fun you know so like as an engineer you would want to do it but I think this is the sort of thing where like sometimes you need consensus and sometimes you just have to act and in this case because the path was unclear it was important to act but at the same time I didn't know how to proceed so we had to kind of get everyone together to build consensus and so I think it's like as a leader you're kind of always juggling these kind of two things

[34:20](https://realalpha.app/v/AmdLVWMdjOk/?t=2060) After that experience, just being given hundreds of engineers and scoping things out, do you have any tips for someone who's like a tech lead who needs to do quick scoping? Anything that worked well for you? I think the biggest thing, I think the biggest failure mode that I've seen is people just taking too long and getting too into the weeds. There's always an infinite number of details. Just start with a high level.

[34:43](https://realalpha.app/v/AmdLVWMdjOk/?t=2083) You know, most technical scoping you can do within like 30 minutes, very, very roughly. And if you don't know the systems, like nowadays you would just use quad code, run in the code base and just ask it to like, you know, like what are all the systems involved? They can actually just do this for you. And this is another just totally insane change. You know, when I was doing this stuff, I never would have expected that AI could do this for me now.

[35:06](https://realalpha.app/v/AmdLVWMdjOk/?t=2106) But now it does. In the past, I think that would have been my biggest advice though, is just time box it. Spend maybe 30 minutes, maybe like couple hours max If you have to like dig through code and stuff, definitely reach out to experts and just make a list of experts, talk to all of them, run the design by them. Don't just ask them for input, give them a straw man, because then they can actually like give you feedback on it.

[35:29](https://realalpha.app/v/AmdLVWMdjOk/?t=2129) And it's something to go off of. Continuing with your career story, I think the thing that got you promoted to senior