Why aren't we talking more about engineering strategy?
I learn a lot from other people experiences. I don’t copy them but learn which decision process given their context, what did they take into account, why they decide what they decide, and which is the outcome of those decisions.
That’s why I read several newsletters and listen several podcasts where people share those experiences. But they are mostly about business, product, and alike.
Here is a short list of some I follow:
Lenny’s Podcast: Product | Growth | Career - Product and Business
Startups for the rest of us - Product and Business
PRODUCTEA with Leah, Growth & Senior Leadership - Product and Growth
Tech Lead Journal - Tech
Podcast de Itnig: Historias de startups - Business
Engineering Enablement - Tech
When I look for engineering strategy stuff, there are few people that share their story, their context, and which decisions they had to make. In contrast, I find a lot of content related to X or Y technology, why A vs. B framework, culture, testing, … or why Agile is important.
All of that is great, but I missed talking specifically about engineering strategy and how that addresses the business.
I aimed to invite people to this newsletter to speak about their strategies, but very few people had the time and patience to write it. Indeed, it is hard to write an engineering strategy internally, you can imagine how harder is it externally.
Let me share with you some examples:
Then I thought, I usually learn more with a conversation. Maybe a podcast is a better approach to share experiences on strategy. That’s why I started the Engineering Strategy Podcast.
Since then, I didn’t have much success inviting people to the show. It has been a combination of:
“I’m not sure if I can speak about strategy.”
This one repeats a lot! Interestingly, our peers in sales, business, product, … they talk about the details of strategy publicly, why aren’t we?
“I don’t know how to do strategy.”
None of us knew at the beginning, I will help you frame your context, learnings, and decisions in a way that it follows the engineering strategy structure I describe here.
“Will this be useful for someone?”
Sure it is! You might think you are doing is quite obvious, but sometimes it helps people earlier in their strategy journey to know new ways to do things that they didn’t think of.
“Can I speak in my mother language?”
Yes! Of course, that’s why I will record mainly in Spanish and English. Talking about strategy is hard, let’s make it easier.
“Things are changing a lot, I cannot deal with more stuff right now”.
I’m sad to see many engineer leaders being so stressed with a constantly changing environment and high job uncertainty.
At the same time, when the situation becomes less stressful, I do believe that the learnings that we are living as the industry isn’t as 2020 will be amazing.
So, what can we do?
1. Open a form to invite you to the podcast
If you want to share your engineering strategy experience, we can talk!
How does it work?
You submit your desire to appear in the podcast using the form.
I review your story and context.
We schedule a 60min call to talk about the format and how to organize the script to share your engineering strategy.
We schedule a 90min call to record the podcast. The podcast is usually 45 to 60min, but we schedule a little more just in case.
We review the podcast and I publish it.
2. I have a question
Not always we want to expose ourselves to a podcast, but we still have questions about engineering strategy. If that’s your case, you can submit your question here, and I will record a podcast replying several of them,
Thank you a lot for reading this post 😄.
I love to read your feedback and opinions to help me improve. You can DM at my LinkedIn or just leave a comment using the following links: