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Set Policy for strategy
This is a work-in-progress draft!
Explain the general role of policy 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 As such, some of the links go to other draft chapters, both published drafts and very early, unpublished drafts.
What is policy?
…
now is the time to judge!
now is the time to resolve/reconcile all the conflicts
Deciding where to focus
TODO: don’t solve everything, figure out which things that you will try to solve
There are infinite number of potential solutions to your diagnosis, and your policies must decide how you’ll channel your efforts. For example, the strategy for navigating private equity ownership recognizes that the new ownership is likely to push for a reduction in engineering headcount:
Based on general practice, it seems likely that our new Private Equity ownership will expect us to reduce R&D headcount costs through a reduction. However, we don’t have any concrete details to make a structured decision on this, and our approach would vary significantly depending on the size of the reduction.
This strategy’s policies chose to accept an upcoming headcount reduction as inevitable, prioritizing work such as an N-1 backfill strategy. However, you might easily go the opposite direction and try to convince the new ownership to maintain, or even increase, their investment. Depending on the nuanced details, both approaches are viable, and your policies have to determine which is the best option for you.
Kinds of policies
TODO: max a sort of taxonomy of policies one can select from, e.g. defaults, requirements, advisories, exceptions, etc
include a lot of examples of these from strategies
resource allocation across potential objectives, etc
exception policies
- escalate to architecture team
- escalate to CTO
- See how Calm’s engineering strategy relied on CTO escalations
How are decisions made within engineering? (And why do we work this way?)
Criteria for effective policies
TODO: write
In The Engineering Executive’s Primer’s chapter on engineering strategy, I introduce three criteria for evaluating policies. They ought to be applicable, enforced, and create leverage.
Strategy altitude & flexibility
It can be difficult to write guiding policies without unnecessarily constraining the teams within your organization. You can argue that each team’s roadmap and technology choices fall within the scope of engineering strategy. I recommend using engineering strategy sparsely, while ensuring you take advantage of its unique advantages.
To ensure your strategy is operating at the right altitude, ask if each of your guiding policies is applicable, enforced, and creates leverage:
Recognizing your restrictions
TODO: depending on your agency within the organization, you have to be realistic
you need things to be enforcable, either through authority or culture
- stuff you can do
- stuff you can convince authorities to do
- things that even authorities cannot do, e.g. unalignable, recognizing culture and behaviorial realities
- where history will support, and will history will constraint
What to omit: you can’t cover everything
Even the most comprehensive strategy will omit many important details, but it should explain how those decisions are generally made. This is a nuanced navigation of positive and negative freedoms between teams and others impacted by their decisions.
As an engineering executive, it’s particularly important to think about the priorities that no one else is asking for (especially security, reliability, compliance, and developer productivity), and ensure your investment thesis addresses those.
Common / recurring policies
TODO: write
- With your diagnosis in hand, the next step is determining guiding policies. There are many, many ways to articulate your guiding policies, but I would recommend starting by answering three key questions, which I believe get at the heart of effective engineering strategy:
- What is the organization’s resource allocation against its priorities? (And why these ones?)
Summary
TODO: write
Now we can move into discussing how to operate the policies you’ve created.