Crafting Engineering Strategy

Preface

In 2015, the Mini Sky City skyscraper, with 57 floors, was built in Changsha, China, in 19 days. Driving my son to school over the past few years, I’ve watched a nine-story building in San Francisco get built over three years. There’s some argument that Mini Sky City’s record isn’t legitimate because it relied heavily on modular, prebuilt architecture, but I can assure you that the three-years-and-counting building in San Francisco is similarly being built from modular components. Why did one of these projects build three floors per day, and the other three floors per year?

How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner (Crown Currency, 2023) explores how strategy impacts the successful creation of complex buildings. The authors’ foundational observation is that you go fast by making most of your mistakes where it’s cheapest—for example, in simulation—and fewer where it’s difficult to fix—for example, after you’ve built most of a physical building. In my experience, their observation applies equally well to software engineering strategy.

However, the problem in software engineering goes further. You’ll never meet an architect who hasn’t seen a building plan, but the majority of software engineers and even software executives will tell you that they’ve never seen a clear, written engineering strategy. There’s a widespread belief that engineering strategy doesn’t exist—but if you ask the right questions, you’ll find that almost every engineer has a strong instinctive ...