Once you’ve written your strategy’s exploration, the next step is working on its diagnosis. Diagnosis is understanding the constraints and challenges your strategy needs to address. In particular, it’s about slowing yourself down from jumping to solutions before fully understanding the nuances and constraints of the problem. If you ever find yourself wanting to skip the diagnosis phase–let’s get to the solution already!–then maybe it’s worth acknowledging that every strategy tha...| lethain.com
A surprising number of strategies are doomed from inception because their authors get attached to one particular approach without considering alternatives that would work better for their current circumstances. This happens when engineers want to pick tools solely because they are trending, and when executives insist on adopting the tech stack from their prior organization where they felt comfortable. Exploration is the antidote to early anchoring, forcing you to consider the problem widely b...| lethain.com
In my career, the majority of the strategy work I’ve done has been in non-executive roles, things like Uber’s service migration. Joining Calm was my first executive role, where I was able to not only propose but also mandate strategy. Like almost all startups, the engineering team was scattered when I joined. Was our most important work creating more scalable infrastructure? Was our greatest risk the failure to adopt leading programming languages? How did we rescue the stuck service decom...| lethain.com
At the core of Uber’s service migration strategy (2014) is understanding the service onboarding process, and identifying the levers to speed up that process. Here we’ll develop a system model representing that onboarding process, and exercise the model to test a number of hypotheses about how to best speed up provisioning. In this chapter, we’ll cover: Where the model of service onboarding suggested we focus on efforts Developing a system model using the lethain/systems package on Githu...| lethain.com
