Crafting Engineering Strategy 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. Buy on Amazon. Available from O'Reilly. Contents Preface Introduction Introduction Is engineering strategy useful? Who gets to do strategy? When to write strategy, and how much? Steps Steps to build an engineering strategy. Exploring Diagnosis Refining Setting policy Operations 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 Introduction to case studies Uber's service migration strategy circa 2014. Service onboarding model for Uber (2014). Wardley mapping the service orchestration ecosystem (2014). How should you adopt LLMs? Modeling impact of LLMs on Developer Experience. Wardley mapping the LLM ecosystem. Modeling driving onboarding. Navigating Private Equity ownership. Eng org seniority-mix model. 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 Is this strategy any good? How to get better at strategy? Appendix Strategy resources AI Companion for Crafting Engineering Strategy AI Companion / Preface AI Companion / Foundations of Collaboration AI Companion / Cowriting AI Companion / Reviewing and Editing AI Companion / Generating Systems Models AI Companion / Generating Wardley Maps AI Companion / Next Steps