How to get better at strategy?

One of the most memorable quotes in Arthur Miller’s The Death of a Salesman comes from Uncle Ben, who describes his path to becoming wealthy as, “When I was seventeen, I walked into the jungle, and when I was twenty-one I walked out. And by God I was rich.” I wish I could describe the path to learning engineering strategy in similar terms, but by all accounts it’s a much slower path. Two decades in, I am still learning more from each project I work on. This book has aimed to accelerate your learning path, but my experience is that there’s still a great deal left to learn, despite what this book has hoped to accomplish.

This final chapter is focused on the remaining advice I have to give on how you can continue to improve at strategy long after reading this book’s final page. Inescapably, this chapter has become advice on writing your own strategy for improving at strategy. You are already familiar with my general suggestions on creating strategy, so this chapter provides focused advice on creating your own plan to get better at strategy.

It covers:

• Exploring strategy creation to find strategies you can learn from via public and private resources, and through creating learning communities
• How to diagnose the strategies you’ve found, to ensure you learn the right lessons from each one
• Policies that will help you find ways to perform and practice strategy within your organization, whether or not you have organizational authority
• Operational mechanisms to hold yourself accountable to developing a strategy practice
• My final benediction to you as a strategy practitioner who has finished reading this book

With that preamble, let’s write this book’s final strategy: your personal strategy for developing your strategy practice.

Exploring strategy creation

Ideally, we’d start our exploration of how to improve at engineering strategy by reading broadly from the many publicly available examples. Unfortunately, there simply aren’t many easily available works to learn from others’ experience. Nonetheless, resources do exist, and we’ll discuss the three categories that I’ve found most useful:

1. Public resources on engineering strategy, such as companies’ engineering blogs
2. Private and undocumented strategies available through your professional network
3. Learning communities that you build together, including ongoing learning circles

Each of these is explored in its own section below.

Public resources

While there aren’t as many public engineering strategy resources as I’d like, I’ve found that there are still a reasonable number available. This book collects a number of such resources in the appendix of engineering strategy resources. That appendix also includes some individuals’ blog posts that are adjacent to this topic. You can go a long way by searching and prompting your way into these resources.

As you read them, it’s important to recognize that public strategies are often misleading, as discussed previously in evaluating strategies. Everyone writing in public has an agenda, and that agenda often means that they’ll omit important details to make themselves, or their company, come off well. Make sure you read through the lines rather than taking things too literally.

Private resources

Ironically, where public resources are hard to find, I’ve found it much easier to find privately held strategy resources. While private recollections are still prone to inaccuracies, the incentives to massage the truth are less pronounced.

The most useful sources I’ve found are:

• peers’ stories – strategies are often oral histories, and they are shared freely among peers within and across companies. As you build out your professional network, you can usually get access to any company’s engineering strategy on any topic by just asking.

  There are brief exceptions. Even a close peer won’t share a sensitive strategy before its existence becomes obvious externally, but they’ll be glad to after it does. People tend to over-estimate how much information companies can keep private anyway: even reading recent job postings can usually expose a surprising amount about a company.

• internal strategy archaeologists – while surprisingly few companies formally collect their strategies into a repository, the stories are informally collected by the tenured members of the organization. These folks are the company’s strategy archaeologists, and you can learn a great deal by explicitly consulting them

• becoming a strategy archaeologist yourself – whether or not you’re a tenured member of your company, you can learn a tremendous amount by starting to build your own strategy repository. As you start collecting them, you’ll interest others in contributing their strategies as well.

  As discussed in Staff Engineer’s section on the Write five then synthesize approach to strategy, over time you can foster a culture of documentation where one didn’t exist before. Even better, building that culture doesn’t require any explicit authority, just an ongoing show of excitement.

There are other sources as well, ranging from attending the hallway track in conferences to organizing dinners where stories are shared with a commitment to privacy.

Working in community

My final suggestion for seeing how others work on strategy is to form a learning circle. I formed a learning circle when I first moved into an executive role, and at this point have been running it for more than five years. What’s surprised me the most is how much I’ve learned from it.

There are a few reasons why ongoing learning circles are exceptional for sharing strategy:

1. Bi-directional discussion allows so much more learning and understanding than mono-directional communication like conference talks or documents.
2. Groups allow you to learn from others’ experiences and others’ questions, rather than having to guide the entire learning yourself.
3. Continuity allows you to see the strategy at inception, during the rollout, and after it’s been in practice for some time.
4. Trust is built slowly, and you only get the full details about a problem when you’ve already successfully held trust about smaller things. An ongoing group makes this sort of sharing feasible where a transient group does not.

Although putting one of these communities together requires a commitment, they are the best mechanism I’ve found. As a final secret, many people get stuck on how they can get invited to an existing learning circle, but that’s almost always the wrong question to be asking. If you want to join a learning circle, make one. That’s how I got invited to mine.

Diagnosing your prior and current strategy work

Collecting strategies to learn from is a valuable part of learning. You also have to determine what lessons to learn from each strategy. For example, you have to determine whether Calm’s approach to resourcing Engineering-driven projects is something to copy or something to avoid.

What I’ve found effective is to apply the strategy rubric we developed in the “Is this strategy any good?” chapter to each of the strategies you’ve collected. Even by splitting a strategy into its various phases, you’ll learn a lot. Applying the rubric to each phase will teach you more. Each time you do this to another strategy, you’ll get a bit faster at applying the rubric, and you’ll start to see interesting, recurring patterns.

As you dig into a strategy that you’ve split into phases and applied the evaluation rubric to, here are a handful of questions that I’ve found interesting to ask myself:

• How long did it take to determine a strategy’s initial phase could be improved? How high was the cost to fund that initial phase’s discovery?
• Why did the strategy reach its final stage and get repealed or replaced? How long did that take to get there?
• If you had to pick only one, did this strategy fail in its approach to exploration, diagnosis, policy or operations?
• To what extent did the strategy outlive the tenure of its primary author? Did it get repealed quickly after their departure, did it endure, or was it perhaps replaced during their tenure?
• Would you generally repeat this strategy, or would you strive to avoid repeating it? If you did repeat it, what conditions seem necessary to make it a success?
• How might you apply this strategy to your current opportunities and challenges?

It’s not necessary to work through all of these questions for every strategy you’re learning from. I often try to pick the two that I think might be most interesting for a given strategy.

Policy for improving at strategy

At a high level, there are just a few key policies to consider for improving your strategic abilities. The first is implementing strategy, and the second is practicing implementing strategy. While those are indeed the starting points, there are a few more detailed options worth consideration:

• If your company has existing strategies that are not working, debug one and work to fix it. If you lack the authority to work at the company scope, then decrease altitude until you find an altitude you can work at. Perhaps setting Engineering organizational strategies is beyond your circumstances, but strategy for your team is entirely accessible.

• If your company has no documented strategies, document one to make it debuggable. Again, if operating at a high altitude isn’t attainable for some reason, operate at a lower altitude that is within reach.

• If your company’s or team’s strategies are effective but have low adoption, see if you can iterate on operational mechanisms to increase adoption. Many such mechanisms require no authority at all, such as low-noise nudges or the model-document-share approach.

• If existing strategies are effective and have high adoption, see if you can build excitement for a new strategy. Start by mining for which problems Staff-plus engineers and senior managers believe are important. Once you find one, you have a valuable strategy vein to start mining.

• If you don’t feel comfortable sharing your work internally, then try writing proposals while only sharing them to a few trusted peers.

  You can even go further to only share proposals with trusted external peers, perhaps within a learning circle that you create or join.

Trying all of these at once would be overwhelming, so I recommend picking one in any given phase. If you aren’t able to make traction, then try another until something works. It’s particularly important to recognize in your diagnosis where things are not working–perhaps you simply don’t have the sponsorship you need to enforce strategy so you need to switch towards suggesting strategies instead–and you’ll find something that works.

What if you’re not allowed to do strategy?

If you’re looking to find one, you’ll always unearth a reason why it’s not possible to do strategy in your current environment. If you’ve convinced yourself that there’s simply no policy that would allow you to do strategy in your current role, then the two most useful levers I’ve found are:

1. Lower your altitude – there’s always a scale where you can perform strategy, even if it’s just your team or even just yourself.

   Only you can forbid yourself from developing personal strategies.

2. Practice rather than perform – organizations can only absorb so much strategy development at a given time, so sometimes they won’t be open to you doing more strategy. In that case, you should focus on practicing strategy work rather than directly performing it.

   Only you can stop yourself from practice.

Don’t believe the hype: you can always do strategy work.

Operating your strategy improvement policies

As the refrain goes, even the best policies don’t accomplish much if they aren’t paired with operational mechanisms to ensure the policies actually happen, and debug why they aren’t happening. Although it’s tempting to ignore operations when it comes to our personal habits, I think that would be a mistake: our personal habits have the most significant long-term impact on ourselves, and are the easiest habits to ignore since others generally won’t ask about them.

The mechanisms I’d recommend:

• Explicitly track the strategies that you’ve implemented, refined, documented, or read. This should be in a document, spreadsheet or folder where you can explicitly see if you have or haven’t done the work.

• Review your tracked strategies every quarter: are you working on the expected number and in the expected way? If not, why not?

  Ideally, your review should be done in community with a peer or a learning circle. It’s too easy to deceive yourself, it’s much harder to trick someone else.

• If your periodic review ever discovers that you’re simply not doing the work you expected, sit down for an hour with someone that you trust–ideally someone equally or more experienced than you–and debug what’s going wrong. Commit to doing this before your next periodic review.

Tracking your personal habits can feel a bit odd, but it’s something I highly recommend. I’ve been setting and tracking personal goals for some time now—for example, in my 2024 year in review—and have benefited greatly from it.

Too busy for strategy

Many companies convince themselves that they’re too much in a rush to make good decisions. I’ve certainly gotten stuck in this view at times myself, although at this point in my career I find it increasingly difficult to not recognize that I have a number of tools to create time for strategy, and an obligation to do strategy rather than inflict poor decisions on the organizations I work in. Here’s my advice for creating time:

• If you’re not tracking how often you’re creating strategies, then start there.
• If you’ve not worked on a single strategy in the past six months, then start with one.
• If implementing a strategy has been prohibitively time consuming, then focus on practicing a strategy instead.

If you do try all those things and still aren’t making progress, then accept your reality: you don’t view doing strategy as particularly important. Spend some time thinking about why that is, and if you’re comfortable with your answer, then maybe this is a practice you should come back to later.

Final words

At this point, you’ve read everything I have to offer on drafting engineering strategy. I hope this has refined your view on what strategy can be in your organization, and has given you the tools to draft a more thoughtful future for your corner of the software engineering industry.

What I’d never ask is for you to wholly agree with my ideas here. They are my best thinking on this topic, but strategy is a topic where I’m certain Hegel’s world view is the correct one: even the best ideas here are wrong in interesting ways, and will be surpassed by better ones.