Crafting Engineering Strategy

Chapter 17. LLM Adoption Strategy

Whether you’re a product engineer, a product manager, or an engineering executive, you’ve probably been pushed to consider using LLMs to extend your product or enhance your processes. LLM capabilities transitioned into the mainstream starting around 2023, and even though most integrations appear superficial, many companies worry that they’re falling behind.

That context makes LLM adoption a great topic for a strategy case study. This chapter contains engineering strategy documents written to determine how a hypothetical company I’ll call Theoretical Ride Sharing should adopt LLMs. Theoretical has 2,000 employees, 300 of whom are software engineers. The company has raised $400 million. It’s doing $50 million in annual revenue and operating in 200 cities across North America and Europe. Theoretical is a ride-sharing business, similar to Uber or Lyft, but its innovation is to use larger vehicles—essentially, reinventing public transit.

Reading These Documents

The documents in this chapter are:

Document 17-1: How Should We Adopt Large Language Models?

This strategy document considers how adopting LLMs might impact the company’s developer experience.

Document 17-2: Modeling LLMs’ Impact on the Developer Experience

A systems model of the software development process at this company.

Document 17-3: Wardley Mapping the LLM Ecosystem

This map of the LLM space focuses on how product companies should address the proliferation of model providers, such ...