Crafting Engineering Strategy

Chapter 4. When Should You Write Strategy–and How Much?

Even if you believe that strategy is generally useful, it is difficult to decide that today is the day to start writing engineering strategy. When you do start writing strategy, it’s easy to write such an overwhelming amount of strategy that your organization ignores it rather than investing time into understanding it.

Fortunately, these are universal problems, and there are a handful of useful mental models to help you avoid both extremes. This chapter covers:

• When to write strategy

• How much strategy your organization can tolerate

• Using strategy altitude—how permissive a given strategy is and where it’s implemented—to manage the overhead that strategies create

• Mechanisms to debug whether you’re doing too much or too little strategy work

When you’re done reading it, you should have a clear perspective on when to start writing strategy, determining how many strategies to write, and using strategy altitude to reduce overhead when you do decide to write a high volume of strategies.

When to Write Strategy

Shortly after becoming Calm’s CTO, I opened a document, titled it “Engineering Strategy,” and then stared into that blank abyss before putting it away for a year. When I came back to it, I documented three guiding principles:

• Choose boring technology

• Resolve conflict with curiosity

• Prefer vendors for commoditized functionality

These simple statements greatly reduced our conflict in decision making, and allowed ...