This is a work-in-progress draft! Even the very best policies fail if they aren’t adopted by the teams they’re intended to serve. In my experience, it’s common for a thoughtful strategy to be ruined by a terrible rollout strategy. Can we persistently change our company’s behaviors with a one-time announcement? No, probably not. The good news is that effectively operating a policy doesn’t have to be magic. There are common patterns that take time and attention, but I’ve seen them w...| lethain.com
This is a work-in-progress draft! Often you’ll see a disorganized collection of ideas labeled as a “strategy.” Even when they’re dense with ideas, these can be hard to parse, and are a major reason why most engineers will claim their company doesn’t have a clear strategy even though all companies follow some strategy, even if it’s undocumented. This chapter lays out a repeatable, structured approach to creating strategy. In it, we’ll cover:| lethain.com
As discussed in Components of engineering strategy, a complete engineering strategy has five components: explore, diagnose, refine (map & model), policy, and operation. However, it’s actually quite challenging to read a strategy document written that way. That’s an effective sequence for creating a strategy, but it’s a challenging sequence for those trying to quickly read and apply a strategy without necessarily wanting to understand the complete thinking behind each decision. This post...| lethain.com
Whether you’re a product engineer, a product manager, or an engineering executive, you’ve probably been pushed to consider using Large Language Models (LLMs) to extend your product or enhance your processes. 2023-2024 is an interesting era for LLM adoption, where these capabilities have transitioned into the mainstream, with many companies worrying that they’re falling behind despite the fact that most integrations appear superficial. That context makes LLM adoption a great topic for a ...| lethain.com
In Staff Engineer’s chapter on Managing Technical Quality, one of the very last suggestions is creating a centralized process to curate technical changes: Curate technology change using architecture reviews, investment strategies, and a structured process for adopting new tools. Most misalignment comes from missing context, and these are the organizational leverage points to inject context into decision-making. Many organizations start here, but it’s the last box of tools that I recommend...| lethain.com