Crafting Engineering Strategy

Chapter 3. Who Gets to Do Strategy?

If you talk to enough aspiring leaders, you’ll become familiar with the prevalent idea that they need to be promoted before they can work on strategy. It’s widely accepted as true, but I’ve found this idea fundamentally incorrect: you can work on strategy from anywhere in an organization. It just requires different tactics to do so.

This chapter explains my belief that anyone within an organization can make meaningful progress on strategy, particularly if you are honest about the tools accessible to you and thoughtful about how to use them.

The themes I’ll dig into are:

• How to do strategy as an engineer, particularly an engineer who hasn’t been given explicit authority to do strategy

• Doing strategy as an engineering executive who is responsible for your organization’s decision making

• How you can develop engineering strategy even in difficult situations, such as when there’s no existing strategy, when acknowledging certain problems is politically sensitive, or when misaligned incentives make consensus challenging

• If this book’s argument is that everyone should do strategy, is there anyone who, nonetheless, really should not do strategy?

By the end, you’ll hopefully agree that engineering strategy is accessible to everyone, even though you’re always operating within constraints.

Doing Strategy as an Engineer

It’s easy to get so distracted by an executive’s top-down approach to strategy that you convince yourself that there aren’t other ...