Components of engineering strategy

Published on May 4, 2024. strategy (22), eng-strategy-book (6)

This is a work-in-progress draft!

Often you’ll see a disorganized collection of ideas labeled as a “strategy.” Even when they’re dense with ideas, these can be hard to parse, and are a major reason why most engineers will claim their company doesn’t have a clear strategy even though all companies follow some strategy, even if it’s undocumented.

This chapter lays out a repeatable, structured approach to creating strategy. In it, we’ll cover:

When you’re done with this chapter, you’ll have a structured approach for writing a strategy document. (It won’t necessarily be easy to read though, if you want to make a readable strategy, read through Making engineering strategies more readable.)

This is an exploratory, draft chapter for a book on engineering strategy that I’m brainstorming in #eng-strategy-book. As such, some of the links go to other draft chapters, both published drafts and very early, unpublished drafts.

Structuring strategy

Sections: Explore, Diagnose, Refine (Test, Map & Model), Policy, Operation

Explore

Talk to experts. Talk to peers.

Pull some ideas from other writing on strategy.

More more detail, read the Exploration chapter.

Diagnose

Talk to stakeholders. Assess reality. Debug previous: failures, successes. Consider: Technical, social, financial, etc.

More more detail, read the Diagnosis chapter.

Refine (Test, Map & Model)

INCORPORATE: I’ve added the idea of testing to this, and I do think it’s one of the missing special tools. e.g. people usually skip testing and go directly into rollout before they even pressure test their strategy. This is basically doomed to fail every time.

From organizing:

Now that we have our initial diagnosis written, it’s useful to refine our understanding of a few of the load-bearing aspects.

Load-bearing is a really critical point, because you’re trying to maximize testing/modeling/mapping energy on the most important areas rather than spending more time on less essential.

This book will go into a variety of mapping and modeling techniques:

the details of using each specific techniques will be covered individually in dedicated chapters.

Refine: Mapping and modeling to see Engineering Strategy It’s rarely written down Examples from case studies of strategies and how you might see them Mapping strategies Intuitive mapping: writing what feels right Talking to a bunch of people – how most new execs build their model Wardley mapping Systems thinking and modeling Constraint optimization as one subset (e.g. Phoenix Project) Techniques from Technology Strategy Patterns Surveying – e.g. ask a bunch of folks

More more detail, read the Refinement chapter.

Policy

What are categories of policy? Need to refer to previous writing to think about this.

Policy: common approaches to solving engineering problems Overview of Engineering Strategies – what can we learn from the deep-dives Evaluating policy proposals Benchmarking & “How big things get done” concepts Policy Transitions – ‘invalidations of diagnosis and how they lead to major policy transitions, perhaps unexpectedly: transition to GenAI, web to Mobile, web 2.0, …

More more detail, read the Policy chapter.

Operate

Event the best policy has to be interpreted. There will be new circumstances its authors never imagined, and you must decide on mechanisms for applying its ideas to new needs.

Good strategies explicitly explain how to operate them:

what are examples of it being correctly applied?
how to get exceptions?
who to ask for advice?

Operation: how to make an engineering strategy real Processes/mechanisms of operation in case studies Enforcement mechanisms CTO Architects “Navigators” Navigators – drafting a blog post on this https://lethain.com/navigators/

More more detail, read the Operations chapter.

A frequent point of disagreement is that refinement should occur before the diagnosis. Another is that mapping and modeling are two distinct steps, and mapping should occur before diagnosis, and modeling should occur after policy. These are both reasonable observations, so let me unpack my ratioale for this structure.

First, by far the biggest risk for most strategies is not that you model too early or map too late, but instead that you simply skip both steps entirely. My foremost concern is minimizing the required investment into mapping and modeling such that more folks do these steps at all. Refining after exploring and diagnosing allows you to concentrate your efforts on a smaller number of load-bearing areas

Is the structure sacrosanct?

TODO: add link to template

I will supply a template. I think templates are very useful for setting a floor of document quality. However, they also set an artificial ceiling for quality, because sometimes the template is a bad fit for a specific problem.

So my advice is: ignore the template if it gets in your way, as long as you understand the rationale behind each of the sections and the tradeoffs of modifying the sections.

Here are a few particularly common variations:

Collapsing Policy and Operations into a single, merged section on strategies that are operationally simple, for example (link to the LLM strategy sample)

Add link to Making engineering strategies more readable

Quote from: organizing for writing/reading:

Reiterating a point from Components of engineering strategy: it’s always appropriate to change the structure that you develop or present a strategy, as long as you are making a deliberate, informed decision.

Why deviate from Rumfeld’s components

As discussed in the introduction, Richard Rumelt’s work on strategy, including Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, proposes a different set of components: diagnosis, guiding policy, and coherent actions.

Summary

Now you know the foundational components of stratey, and can dive into either working down from specific examples to the details by starting with template strategy examples like How should you adopt LLMs? or you can work bottom up, starting with the details of how exploration creates the foundation for an effective strategy.