Crafting Engineering Strategy

Chapter 9. Setting Policy

Chapter 1 started by defining strategy as “making decisions.” Then we dug into exploration, diagnosis, and refinement. Those are three chapters where you could argue that we didn’t decide anything at all. Clarifying the problem to be solved is a prerequisite for effective decision making, but eventually decisions do have to be made. Here, in this chapter on policy and the following chapter on operations, we finally start making some decisions.

In this chapter, we’ll dig into:

• How we define policy, and how setting policy differs from operating policy (as discussed in the next chapter)

• The structured steps for setting policy

• How many policies should you set? Is it preferable to have one policy or many, or does it not matter much either way?

• Recurring kinds of policies that appear frequently in strategies

• Why it’s valuable to be intentional about your strategy’s altitude, and how engineers and executives generally maintain different altitudes in their strategies

• Criteria for evaluating whether your policies are likely to be impactful

• How to develop novel policies, and why it’s rare

• Why having multiple bundles of alternative policies generally indicates a gap in your diagnosis

• How policies that ignore constraints sound inspirational, but accomplish little

• Making progress on your strategy even when your cross-functional stakeholders have an unclear strategy

By the end, you’ll be ready to evaluate why an existing strategy’s policies aren’t ...