Strategy – how are strategic, and how to be seen As a strategic – is one of my constant obsessions. Years ago I read a good strategy/bad strategy, and it has since led my thinking.
One of the things that helps to clarify is that being strategic and be seen if Strategic can work against each other – good strategy is clear, and usually it is performed more than what is being discussed. A continuous frustration for other among indexed people in technology that I am talking to, while we build products and organizations without drama, while we are told that we are simply “not strategic”. The strategy that is needed to circumvent problems that never take place or that creates optionality to resolve quickly is somehow invisible.
But I think that if we get up the org card, strategy is the task. Strategy defines your work and evolves it to meet the organizational needs. Not just one strategy, but multiple strategies that must fit together and be coherent.
Your product strategy. Your technical strategy. Your team strategy. Your U-as-leader-but-also-a-human-being strategy.
As we find our groove in the era of the source limited time that we are currently, unlike the all -strategy of ZIRP (zero interest rates), we must by definition make harder choices, and strategy is how we know what those choices are and when and how to make.
This is the first rule of strategy: strategy is contextual. A crucial insight, because when leaders often fail, it is because they tried to apply a strategy that worked in one context, on another, without considering the difference.
This is true when you change companies, and I think the reason there is such a high failure percentage for manager recruitments*. Those I watched came in with a Playbook, usually including the organization they wanted, and released all goodwill and capital to pursue that goal while achieving very little.
It is also true that when the market changes, our strategy has to change. One of the core characteristics of technical leadership from the ZIRP era was because of it, and the number of people as a proxy for many things that it might not have been (probably) should not have been. One of the biggest shifts were the fired and the mantra of “doing more with less”. Regardless of personal feelings about this subject and what is actually realistic, it is clear that difficult choices and discipline are an important characteristic of the era after the ZIRP.
We could talk about these strategies – product, technical, team, you, like a balanced stool. But realistically, I think it looks more like the above image. The product strategy is a storm (especially pre-product market fit). The technical strategy is a half -built hiding place (you will be added as soon as you have a product market fit). The team strategy is an umbrella (the most flexible and controllable). And the U as a human strategy is nowhere to be found.
This is the second strategy rule: the time frame varies with the level of uncertainty that you navigate.
The idea of a nearby objective is the next logical step in the pursuit of your general strategy, if you achieve this, you confirm your course. If you fail, learn and recapture your options.
We often talk about strategy as if it defines the final status, set the destination and describe. But strategy is about defining the incremental steps – the nearby objectives – that can take us to that final state. Strategy is to understand where we are – context – and the path from there to where we should go **. Every strategic “plan” can best be executed as a series of close objectives.
This error about how strategy is being discussed is why it can be so difficult for some people to be considered strategic. If we think that the strategy displays the final status and distinguishes the nearby objective definitions and implementation that is needed to get there, the person who talks more about the final state can be seen as more strategic than the person who actually reach It.
We need four things for strategy:
- Time – Energy – to think about it deeply
- Context to situate it
- Direction to identify nearby objectives
- Expertise to map the path
All these must come together to create and deliver an effective strategy. It is a balance between them all, who leans in different leashes at different times.
To illustrate why each of these is important, I think it is useful to consider the extremes of each.
If someone is always, we call them a political operator. This is the person in it to get credit, but the people of them ask what they do.
If someone is completely context, we say they can’t see the forest for the trees. They miss the big picture that the details determine.
When someone is all in the neighborhood, we call him a thinker and it is not a compliment. Implementation is an exercise left to the reader.
When someone is all expertise, they present solutions looking for problems. They don’t seem to understand the impact.
Devaluing these things gives us a reason not to do them. So many engineers will tell you that they hate politics, and yes, there is absolutely poisonous politics in the workplace. But there is a baseline where Politics gets done things. It is convincing people that the idea is good and that it can be executed. My favorite explanation of this is Nik means talking about the tower of Eiffels.
Context is important. Yes, you deliver something bigger, but the details have to climb. You cannot cover them all, you must learn how you can distinguish which are important and which are not.
Mapping Near objectives your path. They explain the steps you expect to take between where you are and where you intend to be. Explaining them helps people to take with you.
Expertise is ultimately how you deliver things, you have to understand how you can deliver and how you can validate. Implementation is when the strategy really becomes.
Strategy is difficult, and as a strategic being seen, especially for people with a canal indicated at the bottom are even more difficult. We need all these four things to develop our strategy and help things move forward. And we must be recognized if they all do to be considered strategic.
Returning to our strategy problems – the product, the technical, team and you.
Product strategy stimulates your nearby objectives. Although the product strategy may resemble the task of product management – and to a certain extent that is, but hopefully your product team will not work in a vacuum. Engineering must offer input, but engineering must also understand the product strategy, because everything else has to fit.
Your team exists for a goal and the clearest part of that goal is the delivery of the product strategy. You need direction and alignment to identify nearby objectives. Direction – where the product strategy is going, coordination with what is the most important and what will be delivered when.
Technical strategy develops the context. Your technical strategy is often about popping up the underlying work with which you can deliver the business need. It must be justified, because it is ideally proactive instead of reactive DWZ you implement it for the emergency situation instead of it.
Every technical strategy must start with which problem is solved. A problem is not the absence of a technology – unless, I understand that technology is AI – but rather the problems that technology would solve. So “we have no containers” is no problem. Number of incidents or environmental consistencies. Good technical strategy changes the context over time – which makes more possible – such as building roads on the territory that you have chartered.
Your team strategy must be based on implementation. The product and technical strategy determine the needs of the organization. Your team strategy is about how your team will meet that organizational need, within the limitations of the company.
Post-Zirp this has been a big challenge. Doing more with less means having fewer people, less flexibility, less margin. You have to find out how you retain important people when money is tighter and promotions are more difficult to find. But in the midst of all these challenges, you must perform. If you could build the team in a ZIRP era Than Lever, now you have to deliver while you build the team.
The strategy for you as a person requires that you take time strategic. In this market, many of us do to prove that we are worth staying around, but at some point your work is no longer what is being done this week, and more about what is possible next quarter (and the quarter after that). It has never been so easier to be dosed by the job and to think that that means we are doing a good one, but you could miss important things if you are focused too daily or from week to week and not enough from the month to month.
To complete, strategy is more than just a vision; It is about navigating the path to get there. We have to balance time, context, direction and expertise to ensure that we are not only considered strategic, but really create a strategic path for the teams for which we are responsible – and our own evolving needs to lead them competent.
* I can’t find a great source here, although the search results suggest that it is often accepted #. # Possibly, which links to a site that requires logging in.
** I love the description of Tanya Reilly from the map The Path of the Staff Engineer.
Image credit: Joe Groove
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