Will Larson on YouTube · Open on YouTube
Staff-level impact and technical strategy · Expert · Lesson 93 of 98 · 49 min video, then about 7 hours of practice
Writing technical strategy and vision
After this you can write a technical strategy that diagnoses a problem, sets guiding policies and makes real choices, and a vision that describes where the architecture should be in two to three years.
Why it matters
Strategy documents are how staff engineers align many teams without managing them. A good strategy is a diagnosis of the situation, guiding policies that address it, and concrete actions. It makes trade-offs explicit and rules things out. Will Larson's approach is to write strategy bottom-up: collect several design docs from real decisions, find the patterns, and write those down as the strategy. Trap: a strategy that is a list of goals. Goals are not choices.
How to use this resource
Will Larson on why most engineering organisations lack strategy and how to write one.