[HN Gopher] Writing an Engineering Strategy ___________________________________________________________________ Writing an Engineering Strategy Author : kiyanwang Score : 94 points Date : 2023-02-19 17:53 UTC (5 hours ago) (HTM) web link (lethain.com) (TXT) w3m dump (lethain.com) | sublinear wrote: | Isn't this usually called business process management? | officialchicken wrote: | For those contemplating this, it would be helpful to understand | who is the audience? And in one sentence, what is the purpose of | this document? | thenerdhead wrote: | Engineering teams, leads, and directors that are clueless as to | what they are building and why. For engineering leaders to | practice actual "leadership". | norrsson wrote: | Will Larson wrote two books about Engineering Management and | Staff+ Engineers, based in part from articles from his blog. | Now I suspect he's preparing something for Engineering | Executives (CTOs and such). | | The article is to guide Executives on how to write a company- | wide Engineering Strategy document for medium and large | organizations. | claytonjy wrote: | I'm glad to see this. I love Will's An Elegant Puzzle, but it's | very clear when reading it that it's missing examples and | guidance on how to write these documents he posits are so | essential. | | He says here that most companies/orgs don't actually write this | stuff down, and he himself only did it at his most recent gig. | Has anyone seen this done well in their own companies? Are there | well-known companies with a culture of this kind of writing, that | is generally agreed to be effective? | jk3000 wrote: | In that context, I can recommend reading 'Technology Strategy | Patterns: Architecture as Strategy' | msoad wrote: | I feel like these are the type of documents that are written to | be written and not to be read. Naturally a "strategy" document is | read (and more importantly followed) by everyone. But I've never | seen something that happen in a large organization. Team do their | own thing disregarding most of what the leader on top decided | should happen. The leader is too busy to involve themselves with | actual everyday work. | | The only actionable item is resource allocations coming out of | those strategy documents. The rest is pretty much fluff. | seb1204 wrote: | Well, in my view the leader you described is a manager and not | a (servant) leader that is supporting his team. | ketzo wrote: | I think another, underrated benefit is having something to | point at for new people. | | When an engineer joins the team 6 months into the project, it's | important for them to have context on why you're doing what | you're doing. | | Even if you have to qualify it with a bunch of "oh yeah, we're | not doing X and Y, and we're doing a different version of Z," | it's really nice to get an overview. | [deleted] | simonw wrote: | My favourite piece of writing about engineering management, | bizarrely, is this: The Eleven Laws of Showrunning | http://okbjgm.weebly.com/uploads/3/1/5/0/31506003/11_laws_of... | | It's about running a TV show - which has to be one of the most | challenging management exercises out there: you have a limited | budget, a hard deadline, activist investors ("the network"), | you need to recruit 100+ different people in a very short | amount of time... and you're also expected to write the first | and last episode of the series too! | | The reason this document is relevant here is that the it talks | about the importance of having a clear vision. If you can | express a clear vision for the show, you can then distribute | that vision amongst your lieutenants - who are then empowered | to go and make good decisions without you having to micromanage | every step. | | To my mind, this is the value of strategy and vision documents: | they're about helping people in your organization make good | decisions independently of top-level leadership. | bcherny wrote: | This is a cool document! I love when fields overlap like this | -- project and product management aren't completely different | in tech vs. TV shows. | | That said, the advice is for a very specific situation: when | there is time pressure to get something done, staff to do it, | and the end product has to be thought through more upfront | than iterated towards. | | You'll recognize this isn't always the case in tech. Your | startup may not know what to build yet and is simply | exploring the problem space as quickly as possible; your team | may not be staffed up yet; your team may be staffed and very | senior, which requires a peer relationship instead of | delegation; etc. | | The skill of a good leader is to match their approach to the | situation. | jfoutz wrote: | That is a fantastic doc. It's thoughtful and kind hearted. it | puts the focus and responsibility for work right where it | needs to be. You could almost say, it's just express the | vision and delegate. But the devil is in the details, and | there is a deep fear details are what kills you. This | actually provides a path to responsibly delegate those | details. | | Great great write up. Obviously it's about making a tv show, | but pretty much all of that is applicable to any leader. | thenerdhead wrote: | Now that I come to think about it, I have never seen an | engineering strategy document. | | I think one of the key principles he's trying to say here is that | having a bad strategy is similar to no strategy. Aligned with | Rumelt's wonderful book. | | The big challenge for said good strategy is how certain decisions | have been made. Most people just see a resulting backlog and ask | questions accordingly. But if you knew the underlying strategy | going into these backlog decisions, you'd focus more time on | assessing if that strategy matches with the business and product | needs. | | I think many groups would benefit from hearing about their | engineering strategy from their leaders. Which seems non-existent | in most places. | Spartan-S63 wrote: | This point dovetails nicely with the idea of a "Commander's | Intent." In this case, a strategy document is the intent being | spelled out. If it's written well, a rank-and-file engineer can | read it and understand why certain allocations are made, why | certain priorities are pursued, etc without having to ask too | many questions or feel like a cog in a machine. | valenterry wrote: | I'm a bit confused, the strategy reads more like tactics to me. I | had expected something a bit more high level, with "values" and | "philosophy" and so on. | sorokod wrote: | Taxonomy is tricky but I agree that this is a level in between | strategic and tactical. In the military this level is called | operational. | [deleted] | underwater wrote: | In my opinion values and philosophy would fit with a vision | document. | | That said, the actions section does feel too tactical to me. | Strategy would be more about the goals and targets. | trashtestcrash wrote: | Ugh another leader with their "resource allocation". | webosdude wrote: | I like Will Larson's most of the articles but this one seems all | over the place. Shouldn't engineering strategy be defined by 1. | Customer's needs first and then 2. Internal stakeholders like | developers, marketing, product, analytics etc. needs 3. Company | values and principles could be the next guiding principle. | | I think if you work backwards engineering strategy should become | more clear. That's the part I found strongly missing in that | article. | Terretta wrote: | The tail shouldn't wag the dog. | | But if you don't let the tail wag the dog you'll find you have | a very disaffected tail. | | Turns out putting those three circles at the same table solves | this. | | _Much_ easier said than done. | kodah wrote: | > Maintain 4:1 product engineer to infrastructure engineer ratio. | This has been our ratio for the past several years, and it's | worked fairly well, so we intend to maintain it. | | Really weird, as someone who works as a Software Engineer in | systems. The number of infra programmers you have is not a ratio | to be kept with product developers. It's dependent on the | versatility, modularity, reliability, and performance of the | platform you have internally. More plainly put, if you want only | VM orchestration with very minimal features, that's a different | head count that support virtual machines, FAAS, and container | orchestration. | threeseed wrote: | The only reason I can see you tying product engineers to infra | engineers in that way is if the infra engineers are supporting | them with DevOps activities. For example building CI/CD | pipelines, assisting with deployments etc. | | Otherwise it really doesn't make much sense at all. | andrewem wrote: | A fixed ratio makes sense in the context of how a particular | company operates at a particular time. Given the example | strategy you're quoting is about one company (real or | hypothetical), and it doesn't say that the infrastructure teams | are going to gain or lose a bunch of responsibilities from what | they currently have, it seems pretty clear. When you add in | "Particularly we will avoid hiring that grows our current | headcount." the result is that they're aiming to keep about the | same number of total engineers, and therefore about the same | number of infrastructure engineers. | layer8 wrote: | You could read that ratio as a limit on infrastructure overhead | that one should have. Unless you're in the IaaS business, I | guess. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-02-19 23:00 UTC)