Crafting Engineering Strategy

Chapter 5. Steps to Build an Engineering Strategy

Often you’ll see a disorganized collection of ideas labeled as a “strategy.” Even when they’re dense with ideas, such documents can be hard to parse. This is a major reason why most engineers will claim their company doesn’t have a clear strategy—even though, as you saw in Chapter 1, all companies follow some strategy, even if it’s undocumented.

This chapter lays out a repeatable, structured approach to drafting strategy and introduces each step of that approach. I’ll detail each step further in its respective chapter. Here, I’ll cover how these five steps fit together to facilitate creating strategy, especially by preventing practitioners from skipping steps that feel awkward or challenging. I’ll also look at how to decide for yourself whether to follow these exact steps for your own strategy work or adjust them.

Here is a high-level summary of each step:

Step 1: Exploring

Exploring the wider industry’s ideas and practices around the strategy you’re working on. Exploration is understanding what recent research might change your approach, and how the state of the art has changed since you last tackled a similar problem.

Step 2: Diagnosing

Diagnosing the details of your problem. It’s hard to slow down to understand your problem clearly before attempting to solve it, but it’s even more difficult to solve anything well without a clear diagnosis.

Step 3: Refining

Refinement is taking a raw, unproven set of ideas and testing them ...