The Engineering Executive's Primer

Chapter 3. Writing Your Engineering Strategy

Once you become an Engineering executive, an invisible timer starts ticking in the background. Tick, tick, tick. Eventually that timer will go off, at which point someone will rush up to you demanding an Engineering strategy. It won’t be clear what they mean, but they will want it…really, really badly. If only we had an Engineering strategy, their eyes will implore you, things would be OK. For a long time, those imploring eyes haunted me because I simply didn’t know what to give them. I didn’t know what an Engineering strategy was.

From Appendix E of this book (which describes Stripe’s aspirational approach to balancing technical standardization and exploration), to Staff Engineer’s guide to writing engineering strategy (which I rewrote four times from scratch), I’ve continued iterating on my definition. To put it simply, an Engineering strategy is a document that defines:

• The what and the why of Engineering’s resource allocation against its priorities

• The fundamental rules that Engineering’s teams must abide by

• How decisions are made within Engineering

Operating in the executive role, I’ve finally been able to solidify my point of view on what an Engineering strategy should accomplish, and how an Engineering executive can guide that strategy’s creation. Reflecting on where I was a few years ago—not quite knowing what an Engineering strategy was—this chapter will walk through:

• Richard Rumelt’s definition of strategy: diagnosis, guiding ...