The Engineering Executive's Primer

Appendix E. Magnitudes of Exploration

In Chapter 3, we discussed creating effective Engineering strategies. One challenge with that discussion is that there are very few publicly shared Engineering strategies to learn from. If you don’t happen to work at a company with a clearly written strategy, you’ll rarely see one. To provide some visibility into what these strategies can look like, the whole of this appendix shows a sanitized version of Stripe’s Engineering strategy at a moment in time in 2019.

In short: mostly standardize, exploration should drive order of magnitude improvement, and limit concurrent explorations.

Standardizing technology is a powerful way to create leverage: Improve tooling a bit and every engineer will get more productive. Adopting superior technology is, in the long run, an even more powerful force, with successes compounding over time. The trade-offs and timing between standardizing on what works, exploring for superior technology, and supporting adoption of superior technology are the core of Engineering strategy.

An effective approach is to prioritize standardization, and explicitly pursue a bounded number of explorations that are pre-validated to offer a minimum of an order of magnitude improvement over the current standard.

Standardization

Standardization is focusing on a handful of technologies and adapting your approaches to fit within those technologies’ capabilities and constraints.

Fewer technologies support deeper investment in each, and ...