Why write it down?

This is a work-in-progress draft!

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 As such, some of the links go to other draft chapters, both published drafts and very early, unpublished drafts.

Notes

Strategy is everywhere. Written strategy is rare Interestingly, Uber and Stripe are well-known technology companies, and I wrote a bit above about their technology strategies were, but neither were particularly proactive at writing their strategies down.

I’ve come to believe that:

Most companies do have an engineering strategy Awareness of that engineering strategy is often inconsistent It’s very rare for a company to have a written engineering strategy This is the first really important takeaway from this talk: you can solve half the engineering strategy crisis by just writing stuff down.

We’ll get to solving the other half in a second.

Written strategy is more powerful There are probably an infinite number of reasons why written strategy outperforms implicit strategy, but a few that I’ve seen matter in particularly important ways are:

You can get feedback on it You can make updates to it You can explain why you made updates to it! You can clarify points of confusion Nuance is important, and almost impossible in unwritten strategy It democratizes technical decision making beyond a small caste of architects You can hold people accountable for not following it New hires can learn proactively rather than “fail their way into learning”