Once you become an engineering executive, an invisible timer starts ticking in the background. Tick tick tick. At some point that timer will go off, at which point someone will rush up to you demanding an engineering strategy. It won’t be clear what they mean, but they will want it, really, really badly.

The author explains that an engineering strategy is a plan for how an organization will approach its current challenges, consisting of a diagnosis of the challenge, guiding policies for how to address the challenge, and coherent actions to implement those policies.

An example strategy and the process for writing one, including identifying stakeholders and creating a strategy working group for feedback are also discussed in this article. The article emphasizes the importance of a strong diagnosis and effective guiding policies and suggests that executives can take a more direct approach to writing the strategy than staff-plus engineers.