What are the key questions to answer in your Technical Strategy?

I recently read Technology Strategy Patterns (TSP) by Eben Hewitt (See my review here).

The advice it contained was eminently practical: It proposes a holistic structure to reason about your strategy and provides various patterns to present your work to different audiences for different purposes. Each pattern answers an important question that someone within your organization will require to make a decision about your strategy.

One of my fears in using such a framework is that my team members won't feel that they have space to add to their own thoughts and tools that have worked for them. I also have this fear for myself! Another book that I read in recent years, Accelerate, overlaps several topics in TSP. How can I go about integrating the lessons from these books?

Mind mapping

I started by taking an approach used in a strategy session I participated in last year: I focused on the questions being asked rather than the patterns themselves. My goal was to recontextualize the patterns as answers to these questions. Why?

1. My team members and my future self can add new tools to this model by simply asking a new question that the existing patterns do not answer.
2. We can replace any existing pattern by evaluating if a different tool answers the question in a better way.
3. By focusing on questions that should be answered rather than the tool itself, we can easily strip any "fluff" from our strategy by only answering questions that are being asked.

With this idea, I mapped out the questions which I felt that TSP addressed (sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit) and then connected each to the patterns which answered them.

Strategic questions organized by layer with connections to patterns

This was an extremely fruitful exercise for me, as it really helped with my comprehension of the material.

Tangent! One note to share is that explicitly kept the 4 layer model proposed in TSP: World, Industry, Corporate, Department. I feel these buckets (although not as clearly separated as they seem at first glance) are a logical and understandable way to organize your thinking about each question while forcing you to also consider who you audience is.

What about adding material from other books or people? Accelerate, which I mentioned above, focuses on capability models as a way to think strategically about your organization and as a means of transformation. I added a few questions in the Corporate" branch of the mind map to make space for these:

Adding new questions with connections to tools from Accelerate and other sources

I also added another tool that I find useful, Wardley maps, as a way gauging the maturity of our capabilities.

Key Strategic Questions

I have more to add, but I like the direction this is heading. The mind map visualization has been really helpful in helping me understanding how these questions relate to each other. Here are the Key Strategic Questions I have written so far:

World

• What are the environmental factors and trends impacting your business and industry for the next 3 years?
• What scenarios are likely in the future based on current trends?
  • What is the probability of these scenarios?
• What is your desired outcome in 3 years and what steps must be taken to get there?

Industry

• What is the influence of suppliers, customers and rivals within your industry?
• Where can you grow the business?
• Where are we situated in the industry relative to our competitors?

Corporate

• Who are the stakeholders for your strategy?
• What are people’s roles and responsibilities in creating the strategy?
• What are acceptable growth targets, risks, costs?
• Where and how is value created within the business?
• What organizational capabilities are required to reach our strategic objectives?
  • How do we make a capability available to the organization?
  • What capabilities are necessary for a healthy organization?
• How is the maturity of our capabilities?
  • How do we acquire and maintain a capability?
• What is the state of your portfolio, by:
  • Performance?
  • Readiness?
  • Complexity?

Department

• How will we work?
  • How do we want to work?
  • What practices are needed to support your principles?
  • What tools are needed to enable your practices?
  • What is our state of adoption of tools?
  • What process must exist and what are their current state?
• How do you make decisions about your applications?
• How do you design your applications?

This feels like a solid foundation to build on. Just as important, I feel that the question framing leave a lot of space for teammates and myself to contribute and improve.