I recently had the opportunity to present to a small group of early-stage founders about evolving their engineering organization as their company scaled. While preparing, I realized that the most relevant piece I’ve written about organization design was about running reorganizations.| lethain.com
Even if you believe that strategy is generally useful, it is difficult to decide that today’s the day to start writing engineering strategy. When you do start writing strategy, it’s easy write so much strategy that your organization is overwhelmed and ignores your strategy rather than investing time into understanding it. Fortunately, these are universal problems, and there are a handful of useful mental models to avoid both extremes. This chapter covers:| lethain.com
Standardizing on a given platform or technology is one of the most powerful ways to create leverage within a company: improve the tooling a bit and every engineer will get more productive. Exploration is, in the long run, an even more powerful force, with successes compounding over time. Developing an investment thesis to balance the ratios and timing of standardization and exploration is a core challenge of engineering strategy.| lethain.com
A system dynamics model, properly considered, is just an analogy dressed up in a bit of formalism.| twitchard.github.io
