Session summary

Communicating what your team needs to do and why is one of the most crucial aspects of your role. As an engineering leader, you are expected to translate the strategy set by senior leadership to your team. This is vital to ensuring that your team is focused on shared goals and pointing in the right direction. But articulating your strategy can be difficult, especially when there’s uncertainty raining from above.

We’ll explore how to effectively communicate strategy to your team to ensure everyone is on the same page, and how to know what you are doing is moving you towards your strategic goals.

Session 3 takeaways and homework

In this session you've learnt:

• An effective strategy is about achieving a shared understanding of what is important that can guide your decisions on what to spend your time on
• The strategy for your team is much more likely to be successful if it aligns with the strategy for your organisation
• A good tech strategy should be simple so that everyone working on it knows what they need to do
• You need to work with people to develop an effective strategy to understand your domain, then to collaborate to create the strategy, and finally to continue to evolve your documented strategy over time.
• A simple strategy provides the structure for your team to prioritise from a long list of potential work and see measurable improvement.

You've discussed:
Reaching a consensus about what the most important thing is to define the strategy for your team's work. You also thought about how it contributes to the overall tech strategy for your organisation. Finally, you focused on turning that strategy into concrete work, thinking about the one thing you could do next quarter that would deliver on this strategy.

You should be able to distil the tech strategy down into a single sentence.

Homework

Now that you found some common ground, work with your team to produce a simple, succinct statement of your strategy. 

Write down your tech strategy in: 

• One paragraph 
• One sentence 
• Ten words max 

We recommend the following reading to help you plan and develop your tech strategy:
📖 Good Strategy/Bad Strategy by Ronald Rumelt
💻 Writing Engineering Strategy by Will Larson
💻 Make Boring Plans by Camille Fournier