Perhaps the most important piece of the Steps to build an engineering strategy is strategy refinement. As we already worked through the overview of strategy refinement in the “Steps” section of this book, the goal of the “Refinement” section is to go into much greater detail about the three core mapping techniques: strategy testing, systems modeling, and Wardley mapping.

As we work through them, keep in mind that there are many other techniques out there, such as the many covered in Eben Hewitt’s Technology Strategy Patterns. This section covers those that I’ve found most useful, and you can find breadcrumbs to those preferred by others in the appendix on strategy resources.

If I could only popularize one idea about technical strategy, it would be that prematurely applying pressure to a strategy’s rollout prevents evaluating whether the strategy is effective. Pressure changes behavior in profound ways, and many of those changes are intended to make you believe your strategy is working while minimizing change to the status quo (if you’re an executive) or get your strategy repealed (if you’re not an executive). Neither is particular helpful.

While I was probably late to learn the concept of strategy testing, I might have learned about systems modeling too early in my career, stumbling on Donella Meadows’ Thinking in Systems: A Primer before I began my career in software. Over the years, I’ve discovered a number of ways to misuse systems modeling, but it remains the most effective, flexible tool I’ve found to debugging complex problems.

In this chapter, we’ll work through:

The first time I heard about Wardley Mapping was from Charity Majors discussing it on Twitter. Of the three core strategy refinement techniques, this is the technique that I’ve personally used the least. Despite that, I decided to include it in this book because it highlights how many different techniques can be used for refining strategy, and also because it’s particularly effective at looking at the broader ecosystems your organization exists in.