Technical strategy
On this page 9 topics
Overview
Topics
- Connecting business priorities to engineering investment
Learn first
4.5 h of practice (estimate)
Learning outcomes
- Connect business priorities (growth, margin, risk, speed) to engineering investment explicitly.
- Write an organization-wide technical strategy from evidence: data on delivery, incidents, cost, and engineer experience.
- Make trade-offs visible: what the organization will stop doing to fund the strategy.
- Get a strategy endorsed by engineering and business leadership and keep it current.
Lessons
- 01Strategy at organization scale
- 02From business priorities to engineering bets
- 03Gathering evidence across 20 teams
- 04Writing the diagnosis
- 05What we will stop doing
- 06Endorsement and refresh cycles
- 07Demo: diagnosing Platform 2.0 from delivery and incident data
- 08Demo: turning three business goals into two engineering bets
Lab and exercises
Lab
STF-002-LAB1 · Platform 2.0 strategy
Outcomes: 1–4 · Time: ~3 h
- Gather evidence: delivery data, incident history, cloud cost by team, and survey comments (use the case materials).
- Write the diagnosis, naming two or three root causes with evidence.
- Write guiding policies and actions; trace each to evidence and a business priority.
- List what will explicitly stop, with the capacity it frees.
- Present to a role-played CTO and CPO, record their decisions, and set a refresh date.
Acceptance: every action traces to evidence and a business priority; at least one thing is explicitly stopped.
Exercises (case-based; six exercises)
| ID | Outcome | Task |
|---|---|---|
| STF-002-EX01 | 1 | Given the business goals "enter three countries", "cut cloud cost 15%", "fewer outages", map each to an engineering investment and a measure. |
| STF-002-EX02 | 2 | Review a strategy document written from opinion ("we should use Kubernetes everywhere"); list the missing evidence and rewrite the first paragraph as a diagnosis. |
| STF-002-EX03 | 2 | Given a table of lead time by team with different definitions of "deploy", explain how you would make the data comparable. |
| STF-002-EX04 | 3 | A strategy proposes four new initiatives and no stops. Identify three things to stop and quantify the capacity freed. |
| STF-002-EX05 | 4 | Plan the endorsement: who to pre-wire, what each leader must decide, and how objections are handled. |
| STF-002-EX06 | 4 | Six months on, delivery data contradicts one guiding policy. Describe how the refresh process responds. |
Show solutions
- EX01 Countries: self-service new-service path (days from idea to production); cost: standard compute templates and rightsizing (cost per order); outages: shared reliability program (repeat incidents per quarter).
- EX02 Missing: baseline data, alternatives, cost, link to a priority. Rewrite as a problem statement with evidence.
- EX03 Agree one definition (for example, production deploy of a customer-visible change), re-extract from deploy logs, and flag teams whose data cannot be reconciled.
- EX04 Examples: duplicate CI tools, a bespoke logging stack, an optional review board; state engineer-months freed per item.
- EX05 Pre-wire the CTO, CPO, VP Engineering, and two senior managers; ask for a sponsor, funding, and a named stop; record objections and responses.
- EX06 Treat as new evidence: publish the data, revise or retire the policy, and tell teams what changed and why.
Outcomes are also checked by the quiz; the lab acceptance covers evidence tracing and the stop.
Workplace evidence: an organization-wide strategy you authored or shaped that leadership adopted.
Quiz
Outcomes: O1 business priorities to investment · O2 evidence-based strategy · O3 explicit trade-offs · O4 endorsement and refresh.
A self-check for you: nothing is graded, saved or sent anywhere. Choose an answer, then check it. You can try again as often as you like.
Practical part
Six case exercises STF-002-EX01 to EX06 plus the lab, defended as a strategy to a role-played CTO and CPO. Pass: at least five of six exercises correct, quiz at least 8/10, and a strategy in which every action traces to evidence and a priority, with at least one explicit stop.
Common mistakes
Strategy written from opinion; no trade-offs; a strategy owned by one person that nobody else can explain.
Assessment
Strategy defense.
Workplace evidence
An organization-wide strategy you authored or shaped that leadership adopted.
Career relevance
Executive communication (STF-017) and solution roadmaps (ARC-036).