Plan before pressure: avoiding ambitious but low-impact strategy.

strategy (37)

Note: this was an article I intended to write for Drafting Strategy book but ended up not really needing it. Maybe something else to say on this topic outside of the book.

This is a work-in-progress draft!

The belief that strategy is complex often gets people in trouble. It’s appealing to believe that strategies fail due to detailed errors in decision-making, or the unanticipated move of an adversary, and maybe that’s true when it comes to grand company strategies. However, my experience is that engineering strategies fail for very mundane reasons. The most common of these mundane reasons is that executives assume their strategy is good enough and move to rolling the strategy out before validating it works.

migration however

However, in my experience most strategies fail because they skip the refinement step. Refinement solves a critical problem: senior leaders have a lot of business context, but they often don’t know how their own company works in the details.

Likely the most frequent cause of failed strategy is moving from diagnosis to the implementation phases (creating policy and operational mechanisms) without spending any time working on refinement.

Explain the general role of testing, mapping and modeling for writing strategy.

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 As such, some of the links go to other draft chapters, both published drafts and very early, unpublished drafts.

Plan before pressure

…

Anti-pattern: pressure before plan

  • erlang implementation at Yahoo
  • agile rollout at Stripe
  • uber rearchitecture
  • stripe java rearchiture
  • calm service rollout
  • carta service rollout

Iterative testing

Systems modeling

Constraint optimization as one subset (e.g. Phoenix Project) – maybe model some stuff from phoenix project?

Wardley mapping

Notes and techniques

  • Testing – e.g. example of Project Starling, Project Puffin
  • Wardley mapping
  • Systems modeling *
  • Write five, then synthesize – mapping technique of internal documents
  • Techniques from Technology Strategy Patterns