Engineering Strategy beyond Tech and Control
Identifying what's necessary to overcome the high stakes challenge
One of the main misunderstandings I identified when people learn about Engineering Strategy is its scope.
When I ask technical leaders about its strategy, it usually has two traits:
It’s only tech.
It’s about what they can control, or think they can control.
These two traits apply to CTOs to middle engineering management, and how those two traits apply will differ depending on the role on how they look like.
Engineering Strategy beyond Tech
Overcoming a high stakes business challenge from an engineering point of view can require all sorts of small actions in multiple dimensions, thinking only about the architecture, frameworks, Cloud, AI, and alike is limiting our area of impact.
Yes, those areas are essential to our work, but we need to think beyond those.
Maybe, in order to overcome the challenge, we need to think in terms of:
Organizational structure
Hiring processes
Collaboration with Product and Design
How legal is involved on the delivery
Etc.
When organizations reach a certain engineering maturity, the improvements will be beyond tech as a silo, but tech as a collaborator with all the other departments.
It is strange that we can work in isolation on the high stake business challenge, but we need to find what’s the best approach with the other disciplines in the company.
And sometimes, the best way to address something is to know when the solution isn’t tech related. That’s also a good outcome.
Engineering Strategy beyond what you can control
One might want to design a strategy within the constraints she or he might have.
This is the product roadmap, I will design an engineering strategy dedicating the 20% of eng capacity.
I have a team with only one backend, we will adapt to this constraint and make everything frontend because that’s how we can accomplish the roadmap. So, let’s make an architecture that takes this into account.
And most of us work within constrains that we cannot change, but we can influence our leadership to take into account what would be possible if we loosen the constraints.
We can start using the engineering strategy as an influencing mechanism to highlight what do we have now, what we aim to achieve, and what would be possible if we loosen or entirely remove certain constraints.
What for you is a constraint, for your leadership might not be.
You can start looking for areas that will better futures but improving today’s context.
This is called Ideal Present by Jabe Bloom.
So, when designing your engineering strategy, ask yourself:
What would I do if you were in your manager’s position?
If this constrain wouldn’t exist, how the strategy would change?
What’s needed to remove that constrain?
You will find that most of those answers require collaboration and influencing, and that’s a crucial work from any strategist.