Day 26: Defining Strategic Blocks for Your Engineering Strategy

Be Better Engineering Leader, a 30 Days Series

Nov 25, 2024

This is the sixth week of a series of daily lessons on how to Be a Better Engineering Leader. I recommend spending up to an hour on each lesson to gain insights into Product, Technology, and People—areas critical for every Engineering Manager.

Welcome to Day 26! Today, we’re taking a deep dive into defining the strategic blocks of your engineering strategy.

The Goal for Today

We will translate the input collected (Day 23) into specific strategic blocks, guiding policy and coherent actions. This will provide a clear roadmap for your team to tackle challenges effectively and leverage opportunities.

Steps to Define Strategic Blocks

1. Review Your Input

Start by revisiting the data you’ve gathered about your team’s strengths, challenges, opportunities, bottlenecks, and distractions (Day 23).

2. Identify Strategic Blocks

Strategic blocks are specific focus areas that translate your input into guiding policy and actionable steps. Here’s how to define them using Engineering Strategy Template (link in the bottom):

Leverage Objective: Focus on what will have the most significant impact with the least effort. For instance, if your team is struggling with frequent build failures or production issues, investing in automated testing and CI/CD can dramatically improve productivity and confidence.
Proximate Objective: Set achievable, near-term goals that act as stepping stones toward your larger strategy. These should be clear, actionable, and aligned with your long-term vision. Example: For a team aiming for continuous delivery, start with implementing automated testing for a specific service before expanding to the entire system.
Weakest Link in the Chain: Identify the primary bottleneck that limits your team’s overall performance. Focus on resolving this issue first, as it will unlock more significant improvements. Example: If cross-team communication is a bottleneck, establish engineering guilds or regular cross-functional meetings to improve knowledge sharing and collaboration.
Power of Design: Decide how you’ll allocate resources—should teams work closely together on a single project for rapid progress, or is it better to decouple them for flexibility and parallel development?
Using Advantage: Leverage your team’s strengths to tackle high-impact projects. If you have a strong data science team, prioritize initiatives that make use of advanced analytics to drive business decisions. If you have engineers passionate in UI/UX, pair them with Product Designers.
Riding the Wave of Change: Align your strategy with emerging industry trends. This could mean adopting new technologies like AI or preparing for shifts such as increased remote work. Example: Early adoption of cloud infrastructure allowed Netflix to scale globally and adapt quickly to changing customer demands.

3. Prioritize and Sequence

Rank the strategic blocks by impact and feasibility. Begin with the ones that offer the highest leverage with the least resistance.

4. Develop Action Plans

For each strategic block, outline a high-level action plan. Assign an owner, set milestones, and define success criteria.

For example:

Leverage Objective: Implement CI/CD for the core service.
- Action Plan:
  - Automate build processes
  - Implement feature toggles for safer releases
  - Train the team on new deployment tools
Weakest Link: Improve cross-team collaboration.
- Action Plan:
  - Set up bi-weekly engineering guilds
  - Create a shared documentation hub

Defining strategic blocks is about making your strategy actionable. Use today’s insights to create a clear path for your team to follow.

Extra Resources

Premium Article: Example Strategic Blocks for Engineering Strategy
Framework & Templates: Engineering Strategy Framework
Blog Post: How to Build Engineering Strategy
Book Recommendation: Good Strategy / Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt

Share Your Feedback

How valuable was this lesson for you? Please share your reaction, write the feedback in the comment, as a response to the email or talk to me directly on chat. I would be thrilled to get to know you better so I can adjust my content accordingly.

Has your friend forwarded you this lesson? Consider joining the “Better Engineering Leader” course. More details here.

Do you know anyone who can benefit from the content I share? If so, please forward this email to them.