Crafting Engineering Strategy
How Thoughtful Decisions Solve Complex Problems
by Will Larson
Good decisions are the core of creating software, and strategy is the art of reproducibly making good decisions. Crafting Engineering Strategy explains how you can improve your organization’s decision making both as an engineer or as an executive, grounding the approach in concrete examples from real companies.
Contents
Introduction
Is engineering strategy useful?
When to write strategy, and how much?
Steps
Steps to build an engineering strategy.
Making engineering strategies more readable
Bridging theory and practice in engineering strategy.
Refinement
Introduction to refinement tools
Strategy testing: avoid the waterfall strategy trap with iterative refinement.
Using systems modeling to refine strategy.
Refining strategy with Wardley Mapping.
Strategies
Uber's service migration strategy circa 2014.
Service onboarding model for Uber (2014).
Wardley mapping the service orchestration ecosystem (2014).
Modeling impact of LLMs on Developer Experience.
Wardley mapping the LLM ecosystem.
Navigating Private Equity ownership.
How should we control access to user data?
Should we decompose our monolith?
"We're a product engineering company!" — Engineering strategy at Calm.
How to resource Engineering-driven projects at Calm? (2020)
How should Stripe deprecate APIs? (~2016)
Systems model of API deprecation
Why did Stripe build Sorbet? (~2017)
How to integrate Stripe's acquisition of Index? (2018)
Going Forward
How to get better at strategy?
Appendix
AI Companion for Crafting Engineering Strategy
[DRAFT] Preface to The AI Companion to Crafting Engineering Strategy
[DRAFT] Using this book with an LLM
[DRAFT] Foundation of collaboration (with an LLM to use a book)
[DRAFT] Co-writing strategy with an LLM
[DRAFT] Reviewing a strategy with an LLM
[DRAFT] Generating systems models with an LLM