Название: Crafting Engineering Strategy: How Thoughtful Decisions Solve Complex Problems
Автор: Will Larson
Издательство: O’Reilly Media, Inc.
Год: 2026
Страниц: 303
Язык: английский
Формат: epub
Размер: 10.3 MB

Many engineers assume their organization doesn't have an engineering strategy—when in fact, they often do. It just may not be working. In Crafting Engineering Strategy, Will Larson (author of An Elegant Puzzle, Staff Engineer, and The Engineering Executive's Primer) offers a practical, example-rich guide to navigating technical and organizational complexity through structured, intentional strategy.

Written for senior engineers, engineering leaders, architects, and curious collaborators, this book lays out a repeatable process for building effective, actionable strategies—from early diagnosis to rollout. With lessons drawn from real-world case studies at companies like Stripe, Uber, and Calm, Larson provides a framework for shaping critical decisions around system migrations, API deprecations, platform investments, and more. Along the way, you'll learn to augment technical planning with communication, governance, and systems thinking. Whether you're shaping your team's direction or leading a company-wide initiative, Crafting Engineering Strategy will help you make thoughtful decisions that stick.

However, the problem in software engineering goes further. You’ll never meet an architect who hasn’t seen a building plan, but the majority of software engineers and even software executives will tell you that they’ve never seen a clear, written engineering strategy. There’s a widespread belief that engineering strategy doesn’t exist—but if you ask the right questions, you’ll find that almost every engineer has a strong instinctive understanding of their current company’s engineering strategy. Even if that strategy isn’t particularly good, they’ll know what it is.

I want this book to reshape the conversation around software engineering strategy in two ways. First, I hope to establish a sufficiently clear, shared definition of engineering strategy so that we agree on what we’re talking about. With that definition, we can discuss how to improve our strategies, rather than debating whether they exist. My second goal is to make it easier for all of us to write down our companies’ engineering strategies. If this book is particularly successful, a few years from now the ideas in this book will be obsolete through their own ubiquity. They’ll be so obvious that they’re not worth discussing—and that would be a triumph.

Strategy is often viewed as the domain of Staff-plus engineers and executives. I hope those folks think a lot about strategy, but I believe that everyone in an engineering organization can apply strategy. If you work within or even adjacent to an engineering organization, then this book wants to help you understand and improve on your company’s engineering strategy. Certainly, different roles require different approaches, but you can contribute to improvement.

Finally, I believe a bit of rigor in our thinking can change our lives, our colleagues’ lives, and the lives of the people who use the software that we create. Engineering organizations today routinely waste dozens or hundreds of years of their teams’ lives by refusing to engage with the reality of their problems. Far from an abstract and aspirational endeavor, strategy invests our scarce time wisely—and that’s the bare minimum we owe ourselves, our colleagues, and our users.

This book is intended to be widely accessible, particularly for anyone working in or adjacent to software engineering. However, it certainly won’t be everything to everyone, and I want to acknowledge some of its limitations. First, the examples in this book are rooted in my personal experiences. Second, this book is an opinionated introduction to engineering strategy, and it’s intended to serve as your first introduction to that hopelessly broad topic. Finally, this book touches on software architecture a number of times, as it’s a common topic within engineering strategies. However, it is not a book about software architecture. Where one strategy focuses on software architecture, the next might focus just as heavily on managerial mechanisms, like approving headcount backfills. For a book on architecture, I might suggest Fundamentals of Software Architecture: A Modern Engineering Approach by Mark Richards and Neal Ford, now in its second edition (O’Reilly, 2025).

Whether you’re a product engineer, a product manager, or an engineering executive, you’ve probably been pushed to consider using LLMs to extend your product or enhance your processes. LLM capabilities transitioned into the mainstream starting around 2023, and even though most integrations appear superficial, many companies worry that they’re falling behind. That context makes LLM adoption a great topic for a strategy case study. Although there’s an ongoing investment boom in AI, most scaled technology companies are still looking for ways to leverage these capabilities beyond the obvious, widespread practices like adopting GitHub Copilot. For example, Stripe is investing heavily in LLMs for internal productivity, including presumably relying on them to perform some internal tasks that would have previously been performed by an employee, such as verifying a company’s website matches details the company supplied in their onboarding application, but it’s less clear that they have yet found an approach to meaningfully shift their product, or their product’s user experience, using LLMs.

Supplemental material (code examples, exercises, etc.) is available for download at craftingengstrategy.com.

Build durable engineering strategies from first principles
Apply methods like Wardley mapping and systems modeling
Lead strategy as a staff+ engineer or executive
Learn from detailed case studies across industries
Improve your strategic fluency and influence over time

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