Engineering Strategy and Vision

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Introduction

In large engineering organizations, decisions are made across dozens of teams, tech stacks, and layers of the business. Without clear alignment, teams risk drifting into fragmented architectures, duplicate work, non-reusable, and inconsistent solutions for common problems. Over time, this fragmentation increases cognitive load on engineers, making it harder than necessary to complete assigned work or integrate work completed by different teams moving in parallel.

Without technical alignment, large organizations are losing their potential by limiting reusability and integration possibilities between projects completed by autonomous teams. The final effect is reduced engineering productivity, and adding more developers does not increase velocity by the expected factor. Without alignment, a large organization does not experience the compound effect of having sharable, reusable knowledge, engineering practices, and solutions that increase engineering productivity.

To address this, organizations adopt Engineering Strategy and Engineering Vision as lightweight but powerful tools for proactive alignment. These documents are built bottom-up — from the experiences of engineers, grounded in actual design work — and help the organization move faster by avoiding repeated discussions and by guiding decision-making with shared principles.

What is an Engineering Strategy?

An Engineering Strategy is a collection of documents that are bottom-up, iterative, evolutionary, and feedback-based. These documents capture the shared technical learnings based on past decisions made by an engineering organization.

Crucially, it is not a top-down mandate, but is extracted from real organizational learning — specifically, by analyzing at least 5 Design Documents from actual projects. This ensures that Strategy reflects real-world experience and patterns that have already been proven useful.

A good Strategy:

  • Diagnoses current problems — what are the current problems?
  • Identifies common patterns of solutions — extracted from past projects
  • Synthesizes organizational learning
  • Is concrete and specific, not abstract
  • Aligns with business and user needs — not just technical concerns
  • Includes trade-offs and justifications — why we’re choosing this path
  • Guides decision-making — helping teams avoid re-litigating common issues

Each Strategy evolves through feedback:

  1. First draft is written by an engineer or small core group, preferably by aggregating 5 design documents
  2. Reviewed by at least 5 engineers and stakeholders
  3. Iterated until there is strong alignment and buy-in

The result is a concrete, opinionated document that acts as a tool for proactive alignment — enabling teams to move faster by reusing shared knowledge and avoiding repeated debates.

What is an Engineering Vision?

An Engineering Vision is an achievable forecast of where the organization aims to be 2 years into the future.

It is built from Strategy documents:

  • 25 Design Docs are aggregated into 5 Engineering Strategies
  • 5 Engineering Strategies are aggregated into 1 Engineering Vision

A strong Vision:

  • Provides a clear picture of the future state to guide planning
  • Reflects what is possible — not just aspirational, but realistically achievable with sponsorship and capacity
  • Is aligned with business priorities and user needs

By making this vision explicit, organizations can avoid local optimizations and fragmented efforts — and instead work collectively toward a consistent, valuable future state.

Relation Between Engineering Strategy, Vision, and Design Docs

The documents form an iterative, evolutionary hierarchy:

  • Design Doc → captures decisions and trade-offs on individual projects
  • Engineering Strategy → extracts common patterns and reusable solutions from ~5 Design Docs
  • Engineering Vision → projects the future state (2 years max) based on 5 Strategies

This layered structure ensures the Vision is grounded in reality — not guesswork — and that each level builds on genuine organizational knowledge.

Engineering Strategy vs. Engineering Vision

Engineering Strategy and Engineering Vision serve different but complementary purposes.

Engineering Strategy is a plan of action — a bottom-up, concrete document that captures patterns of solutions to recurring problems, extracted from past projects. It provides specific guidance for how teams should approach technical decisions today, grounded in current business needs and organizational context.

In contrast, Engineering Vision is a forecast of the desired future state, typically 1–2 years ahead. It synthesizes trends from multiple Engineering Strategies and provides a shared direction for where the organization is heading. While Strategy helps teams act consistently in the present, Vision helps teams align on long-term goals — together, they ensure both day-to-day decisions and larger investments move in the same direction.

When to Create an Engineering Strategy?

You should create an Engineering Strategy when:

  • You see recurring technical decisions across projects
  • Teams are having repeated discussions about the same topics
  • You have accumulated 5 or more Design Docs on a given theme
  • You want to drive alignment on shared concerns: architecture, observability, scaling, resilience, continuous delivery, testing, deployment strategies, etc.

Benefits of Having an Engineering Strategy

  • Enable teams to move faster with more autonomy and alignment
  • Faster decision-making
  • Avoid repeated discussions
  • Align execution with business and user priorities
  • Prevent local maximums and promote shared benefits
  • Capture organizational learning in a durable, shareable form

Negative Effects of Not Having an Engineering Strategy

Without an Engineering Strategy:

  • Teams default to local optimization
  • Shared concerns are neglected
  • The same debates happen over and over
  • Valuable knowledge is lost when individuals leave
  • Architecture drifts into inconsistent, fragmented patterns
  • Business outcomes suffer due to technical misalignment

When to Create an Engineering Vision?

Create an Engineering Vision when:

  • Trends and priorities are starting to emerge
  • You have at least 5 mature Engineering Strategies
  • You want to unify leadership across engineering, product, and business
  • You’re planning multi-quarter or multi-year investments
  • You need a north star to guide decision-making

How is an Engineering Strategy Created?

  1. Start from the problem — What issues are slowing us down?
  2. Analyze patterns — Review at least 5 Design Docs
  3. Gather feedback — Interview at least 5 engineers/stakeholders
  4. Write alone — Initial draft by a single engineer or core group
  5. Review together — Core group iteration
  6. Align success metrics — Define outcomes
  7. Get sponsorship — Ensure capacity to execute
  8. Publish — Share broadly and incorporate into team workflows

Example Engineering Strategy Documents

  1. Database Strategy: Choosing the Right Database for the Right Use Case
  2. Observability Strategy: Unified Logging, Metrics, and Tracing Across All Services
  3. Resilience Strategy: Designing for Fault Tolerance, Auto Healing, Graceful Shutdown, and Recovery
  4. Deployment Strategy: Moving Toward Zero-Downtime Deployments and Continuous Delivery
  5. Service Architecture Strategy: Evolving from Monolith to Microservices with Domain Boundaries
  6. API Strategy

How is an Engineering Vision Created?

  1. Synthesize trends — From 5 Engineering Strategies
  2. Ground in reality — Based on what’s achievable in 2 years
  3. Tie to business needs — Strong alignment with product and user goals
  4. Write alone — 1-3 page draft
  5. Review and iterate — With core group and leadership
  6. Get sponsorship — Ensure buy-in across product and engineering
  7. Publish and evangelize — Present widely to guide roadmaps

Example Engineering Vision Documents

  1. Building a Resilient, Scalable, and Maintainable Service Architecture
  2. Data Platform Vision: Enabling Self-Service Analytics and Machine Learning Across the Company
  3. Engineering Vision for Developer Experience: Cutting Build Times in Half and Automating Local Environments
  4. Next-Generation Observability Vision: Full-Service Ownership Through Standardized Monitoring and Alerts

The Writing Loop

Both Strategy and Vision are created via an iterative writing loop:

  • Gather and analyze source material
  • Write alone
  • Review and discuss as a core group
  • Iterate based on feedback
  • Align with stakeholders
  • Publish and communicate
  • Continuously evolve as learning accumulates

The Core Group

For both documents, a core group should drive the process:

  • Senior engineers with relevant domain experience
  • Product partners
  • Engineering managers
  • Cross-functional partners (e.g. security, platform)

Agree on a tie-breaking mechanism up front to resolve disagreements.

Publishing and Communicating Engineering Strategy and Vision

  • Present to engineering all-hands
  • Share with leadership
  • Embed in onboarding
  • Reference in project kickoffs
  • Keep living and updated — evolve continuously

Where to Keep Engineering Strategy and Vision

Tool used to keep Engineering Strategy and Vision documents must allow for documents to be:

  • Versioned
  • Changeable
  • Collaborative
  • Shareable
  • Traceable
  • Commentable

Recommended tools:

  • AsciiDoc
  • Antora
  • Confluence
  • MediaWiki / XWiki
  • GitBook

Executing on Engineering Strategy Toward Vision

Execution depends on:

  • Leadership sponsorship — to ensure execution capacity
  • Cross-functional buy-in — to avoid siloed efforts
  • Clear success metrics — to measure progress
  • Prioritization — strategies integrated into roadmaps and OKRs
  • Iterative learning — continuously refining Strategy and Vision

Summary

Engineering Strategy and Engineering Vision help organizations move faster and smarter — by capturing learning, avoiding repeated debates, and providing clear alignment across teams.

Built bottom-up, from actual experience and feedback, these documents give engineers tools for autonomy while staying aligned with business outcomes.

They are not abstract statements — they are concrete, evolving, actionable guides for how to make better decisions, faster, at scale.

References

  • Larson, W. (2021). Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track
  • Reilly, T. (2022). The Staff Engineer’s Path: A Guide for Individual Contributors Navigating Growth and Change
  • Camille Fournier (2017). The Manager’s Path
  • Crafting engineering strategy. https://craftingengstrategy.com/