October 2025
Intermediate to advanced
310 pages
7h 6m
English
Content preview from Crafting Engineering Strategy
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Chapter 21. Product Engineering Strategy
In my career, the majority of the strategy work I’ve done has been in nonexecutive roles, things like Uber’s service migration (Document 16-1). Joining Calm was my first executive role, where I was able to not only propose but also mandate strategy.
Like almost all startups, the engineering team was scattered when I joined. Was our most important work creating more scalable infrastructure? Was our greatest risk the failure to adopt leading programming languages? How could we rescue the stuck service decomposition initiative?
These strategies are where the Calm engineering team and I aligned after numerous rounds of iteration, debate, and inevitably some disagreement. As strategies, they’re both basic and also unambiguous about our values, and I believe it’s a reasonably good starting point for any low scalability-complexity consumer product.
Reading These Documents
The documents in this chapter are rewritten from memory to capture the strategies we pursued during my time at Calm. They are:
- Document 21-1: “We’re a Product Engineering Company!”: Engineering Strategy at Calm
This document outlines Calm’s strategy for focusing on product engineering work, explicitly not focusing on infrastructure-style foundational work, and the rationale behind that approach.
- Document 21-2: How to Resource Engineering-Driven Projects at Calm
This document summarizes Calm’s approach to investing in Engineering priorities when the prior prevailing belief within ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.