Engineering strategy notes.

Writing an engineering strategy.

Once you become an engineering executive, an invisible timer starts ticking in the background. Tick tick tick. At some point 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 we just had an engineering strategy, their eyes will implore you, things would be okay. For a long time, those imploring eyes haunted me, because I simply didn’t know what to give them: what is an engineering strategy?

Solving the Engineering Strategy crisis.

These are speaking notes for my October 4th, QCon talk in San Francisco. See a video of this talk. Slides for this talk. Over the course of my career, I’ve frequently heard from colleagues, team members and random internet strangers with the same frustration: the company doesn’t have an Engineering strategy. I don’t think this problem is unique to Engineering: it’s also common to hear folks complain that they’re missing a strategy for Product, Design or Business. But, whereas I don’t feel particularly confident speaking to why so many companies are missing a clear Business or Product strategy, I’ve come to have some clear opinions about why so many engineering organizations don’t have a written strategy.

Write five, then synthesize: good engineering strategy is boring.

Few companies understand their engineering strategy and vision. One consequence of this uncertainty is the industry belief that these documents are difficult to write. In some conversations it can feel like you’re talking about something mystical, but these are just mundane documents. The reality is that good engineering strategy is boring, and that it’s easier to write an effective strategy than a bad one.

All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technical people

As I focus on becoming a better manager of engineers, I have been reflecting more and more on the advice that produced a 10X boost in my…

Strategy in Life

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Khan Academy's Engineering Principles

⭐ Read about our 2019 revision of the principles! ⭐ By Ben Kamens You know those super-frustrating movie ... Read more

Designing Strategy: Rushdown, Economy, and Defense

Hey everyone! Today I have a good-old-fashioned formalist-ish game design article. It’s been a little while since I’ve really done one of those, unless it was attached to Push the Lane.…

The Engineering Leadership Report 2026

Our survey of 600 engineering leaders exploring how the role is evolving, where the challenges lie, and what the future holds for the job.

Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

In this article, the author shares their experience as an engineering manager and the challenges they faced when trying to reach alignment and prev...

Many Strategies Fail Because They’re Not Actually Strategies

Many strategy execution processes fail because “new strategies” are often not strategies at all. A real strategy involves a clear set of choices that define what the firm is going to do and what it’s not going to do. Many strategies fail to get implemented because they do not represent such a set of clear choices. And many so-called strategies are in fact goals. “We want to be the number one or number two in all the markets in which we operate” is one of those. It does not tell you what you are going to do; all it does is tell you what you hope the outcome will be. But you’ll still need a strategy to achieve it. Another reason why many implementation efforts fail is that executives see it as a pure top-down, two-step process: “The strategy is made; now we implement it.” That’s unlikely to work. A successful strategy execution process is seldom a one-way trickle-down cascade of decisions.

Patterns of Strategy

Patterns of Strategy shows how the strategic fit between organisations drives strategic direction. It is essential reading for those who wish to understand how to manoeuvre their organisation to change its strategic fit to their advantage. The 80 ‘patterns’ of strategy help you explore options for collaboration and competition within your strategic ecosystem. A practical and authoritative guide, you can use it to plan and navigate your strategic future.

How to not screw up your product strategy | Jade Rubick - Engineering Leadership

An overview of common mistakes people make while developing a product strategy, tips for creating a successful strategy, and how to communicate and execute on a product strategy.

Measuring an engineering organization.

For the past several years, I’ve run a learning circle with engineering executives. The most frequent topic that comes up is career management–what should I do next? The second most frequent topic is measuring engineering teams and organizations–my CEO has asked me to report monthly engineering metrics, what should I actually include in the report? Any discussion about measuring engineering organizations quickly unearths strong opinions. Anything but sprint points! Just use SPACE! Track incident frequency! Wait, absolutely do not track incident frequency! Just make a pretty chart, they won’t look at it anyway! All of these answers, even the last one, have a grain of truth to them, but they skip past an important caveat: there are many reasons to measure engineering, many stakeholders asking for metrics, and addressing each requires a different approach.

Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works

How Strategy Really Works. This approach grew out of the strategy practice at Monitor Company and subsequently became the standard process at P&G.

How to build a generative engineering culture

A generative engineering culture is one where nothing seems to fall through the cracks, “we should” gets prioritized and becomes reality, and original ideas and value come primarily from engineers, rather than management. A culture like this is an engine for building capacity, quality, innovation, and sophistication.