The Staff Engineer's Path

In Good Strategy/ Bad Strategy, Rumelt describes “the kernel of a strategy”: a diagnosis of the problems, a guiding policy, and actions that will bypass the challenges. Let’s look at each one. The diagnosis “What’s going on here?” The diagnosis of your situation needs to be simpler than the messy reality, perhaps by finding patterns in the noise or using metaphors or mental models to make the problem easy to understand. You’re trying to distill the situation you’re in down to its most essential characteristics so that it’s possible to really comprehend it. This is difficult. It will take time. Guiding policy The guiding policy is your approach to bypassing the obstacles described in the diagnosis. It should give you a clear direction and make the decisions that follow easier. Rumelt says it should be short and clear, “a signpost, marking the direction forward.” Coherent actions Once you’ve got a diagnosis and guiding policy, you can get specific about the actions you’re going to take—and the ones you won’t. Your actions will almost certainly involve more than technology: you might have organizational changes, new processes or teams, or changes to projects. I really can’t stress this enough: you’ll commit time and people to these actions rather than to the long list of other ideas that were on the table at the start. This kind of focus will likely mean that you and others don’t get to do some things you’ve been excited about. It is what it is.