Creating a "local strategy" for your team
Heya!
Another week, another email to get you prepared for the week ahead. And next week, roadmaps are coming. It's the time of year to define the plan to ensure the company expands and evolves.
One of the critical tasks as a manager is to align these corporate objectives with your team's day-to-day work. It's likely your team is made up of analytical engineers who are trained to look for weaknesses and flaws in proposals, so you need to be prepared. If you can meaningfully connect your team to the hard things the business is trying to do, your team will be much more productive and eventually more successful.
A technique for doing this is what I like to call "local strategy" (I used to call it a shadow strategy, but it felt too... shady 🥁).
Before we get into what a local strategy is, lets just get clear on plain ole "strategy":
What is a strategy?
A strategy defines the choices you are making in how you are going to achieve your goals. If you have a strategy that reads like "We are going to be the best", while good to know, that's not a strategy, that's a vision. Strategy is the thing that would complete the sentence. "We are going to be the best, and we're going to do it by [insert strategy here]"
| Vision | Strategy |
|---|---|
| We will have the best customer service | The focus will be on decreasing our customer support response times by 50% ... |
| We will be the market leader | We will reshape the market narrative to make speed of delivery the key metric ... |
| We will win the championship | We're going to focus on developing a defensive playing style focused on diminishing our opponents strengths, specifically... |
If you're looking at a strategy that feels fluffy or vision-y, you need something more concrete for your team.
How to craft a "local strategy"
Talk with your team:
As with almost all things management, start by making sure people feel heard. In your 1:1s with the team coming out of the holiday week, lots of folks will be looking ahead, thinking about goals, etc. This is a great time to tie their goals to the company's vision.
The connection can be on any of the ways that your company focuses on engineering growth. It's not a "do you belive in the company" check, but more of a "we're going this direction, here's where I think your goals might align..."
Gather external context:
- Think about any current points of contention that the team has with the direction of their work, can you talk with the people on the other side of those issues?
- Put yourself in the shoes of the most influential engineer on the team, what might their concerns be?
- Talk with your PM about these issues and questions, what are the parts of the plan that they care about the most, and where are they flexible.
Put it all together
Always center on the main strategy, be careful you don't make the "local strategy" become "your strategy". As an EM that's generally not your job.
- If something feels it doesn't have a lot of eng buy-in, rather than push back, can the focus be on the technical side of work?
- If you uncover some second level metrics that feel tied to the strategy, do you have a way to track them over time. Create your own dashboards?
- Work out answers ahead of time to potential questions and concerns that respect the "why" and but focus the answer on what you can control: the "how."
A strategy shouldn't be catchy, and can be as long as you need it to be. Short and memorable qualities are things that help a vision resonate. But a strategy should be clear about what decisions are being made so that work can proceed efficiently.
Share your "local strategy"
Building on the initial phase of talking with people about the business plan, now that you've got something ready, you're gonna need to tel it to people three times to make it stick. Going up the ladder of small -> medium -> large groups:
- Small: Start in 1:1s running things by people ASAP.
- Medium: Reference the shared 1:1 experience in a team setting to ensure that everyone knows what everyone knows.
- Large: In a team meeting talk to the (now familiar) strategy as you're working through the roadmap, connecting features to business goals and their relevance to broader corporate objectives.
Sidenote: I learned about the excellent book Good Strategy / Bad Strategy from Cate Huston's Blog. It makes it's points very well and it'll likely make you a strategy expert at your company.
Even in smaller organizations, it's easy to feel disconnected. But with a decent local strategy, your team should feel more connected and will do better work as the year kicks off.