In Jim Collins’ Great by Choice, he develops the concept of Fire Bullets, Then Cannonballs. His premise is that you should cheaply test new ideas before fully committing to them. Your organization can only afford firing a small number of cannonballs, but it can bankroll far more bullets. Why not use bullets to derisk your cannonballs’ trajectories? This chapter presents a series of concrete techniques that I have personally used to effectively refine strategies before reaching the cannonb...| lethain.com
In How should you adopt LLMs?, we explore how a theoretical ride sharing company, Theoretical Ride Sharing, should adopt Large Language Models (LLMs). Part of that strategy’s diagnosis depends on understanding the expected evolution of the LLM ecosystem, which we’ve build a Wardley map to better explore. This map of the LLM space is interested in how product companies should address the proliferation of model providers such as Anthropic, Google and OpenAI, as well as the proliferation of ...| lethain.com
Below you will find pages that utilize the taxonomy term “Wardley”| lethain.com
While I was probably late to learn the concept of strategy testing, I might have learned about systems modeling too early in my career, stumbling on Donella Meadows’ Thinking in Systems: A Primer before I began my career in software. Over the years, I’ve discovered a number of ways to miuse systems modeling, but it remains the most effective, flexible tool I’ve found to debugging complex problems. In this chapter, we’ll work through:| lethain.com
If I could only popularize one idea about technical strategy, it would be that prematurely applying pressure to a strategy’s rollout prevents evaluating whether the strategy is effective. Pressure changes behavior in profound ways, and many of those changes are intended to make you believe your strategy is working while minimizing change to the status quo (if you’re an executive) or get your strategy repealed (if you’re not an executive). Neither is particular helpful.| 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
