Engineering Leadership: The Hard Parts

Chapter 8. Technical Principles and Strategy

The phrase “developing and implementing technical principles and strategies” sounds fancy—like the title of a 200-slide deck that someone with “enterprise architect” in their job title puts together. In reality, it’s just a fancy way of saying, “What do our technology, principles, architecture, and capabilities need to look like, and how do we get them there to meet our business goals?”

More formally, technical strategy is the comprehensive plan that aligns technology decisions, architecture choices, and capability development with business objectives, providing a framework for making consistent technical decisions that support organizational goals.

Technical principles and strategy (from here on, we’ll just say “strategy”) are part of a roadmap—and indeed, they should be included in your current roadmap. The product features that you plan to build must be supported by the technology and architecture underpinning them. If you’re planning a significant new feature that needs more scale, then your technical strategy must address how that scale will be achieved. It’s also a blueprint—though in many chaotic organizations, it’s one that’s frequently updated and revised. Part architecture document, part register of tools and their selection criteria and evolution, it provides the foundation for planning the addition of people and specific skill sets to your team.

In this chapter, we explore the core principles, frameworks, and practices that ...