Your Org Probably Doesn't Have a Technical Strategy
And no, a roadmap doesn’t count
There’s a gap in how most engineering organizations operate that I keep running into. Product has a strategy. Business has a strategy. The technical direction? That’s usually just whatever fell out of a thousand tactical decisions made under deadline pressure. The architecture you have isn’t the one you designed. It’s the one you ended up with.
I think this is one of the highest-leverage areas for senior IC leaders. Writing down a coherent narrative about where the technology needs to go and why – and then getting people aligned around it – has more impact than almost anything else you can do at the staff+ level.
A roadmap is not a strategy
I want to be precise about this because people use these words interchangeably and they’re not the same thing. A roadmap is a list of projects with timelines. A strategy is the reasoning that tells you which projects should be on the roadmap in the first place.
A good technical strategy has three parts. First, an honest diagnosis of where you actually are. Not where you want to be, not the version you put in the investor deck – the real state. Where’s the risk? What’s fragile? What capabilities are you missing? If the codebase is a mess, say so. If the deployment pipeline runs on hope, acknowledge it.
Second, a set of guiding principles. Given the diagnosis, what rules should govern technical decisions? These are the guardrails that let individual teams make consistent calls without needing approval for everything. Things like “prefer boring technology” or “invest in observability before features” or “design for horizontal scale from day one.”
Third, a small number of high-priority actions. Not a wish list. The most important things. A strategy that tries to do everything is a wish list. The value is as much in what it says no to as what it says yes to.
Why nobody writes one
Usually it’s one of three reasons. Nobody owns it – technical direction is assumed to be a shared responsibility, which means it’s nobody’s responsibility. The EM is focused on execution. The PM is focused on features. The CTO is focused on hiring. Strategy falls through the cracks.
Or the urgent crowds out the important. Defining strategy takes deep thought, broad input, and careful writing. Those things always lose to the next sprint, the next incident, the next reorg.
Or people are scared of being wrong. A published strategy is a falsifiable claim about the future. If you’re wrong, it’s visible. Turns out a lot of leaders prefer the safety of strategic ambiguity over the vulnerability of actually writing down what they think.
How I’ve done it
Start by listening. Talk to engineers across the org. Read the incident reports. Look at deployment metrics. Understand the pain at the ground level, not from the architecture diagram.
Write it down. This is harder than it sounds because writing exposes fuzzy thinking. If you can’t explain it clearly in a document, you don’t have a strategy yet. You have a vibe.
Circulate it broadly and expect pushback. Share the draft with ICs, managers, product, ops. The goal isn’t consensus – you’ll never get that. The goal is comprehension and enough buy-in on the direction to move.
Then keep it alive. A strategy doc nobody reads is not a strategy. Reference it in design reviews. Use it to evaluate project proposals. Update it when the situation changes. It’s a living tool, not a time capsule.
This is IC leader territory
I genuinely believe this is one of the most important things staff and principal engineers can do. You’ve got the technical depth to diagnose the current state honestly. You’ve got cross-team visibility to see patterns. And you’ve got the credibility to propose a direction people will actually follow.
The best strategies I’ve seen were partnerships between a senior IC and engineering management. The IC brings the substance. The manager brings the org context and the authority to resource the priorities. Neither can do it alone.
The real point
Honestly, the most important thing about a technical strategy is that it exists. The act of writing down “here’s where we’re going and why” gives every engineer a framework for making decisions on their own. You don’t have to be the person who makes every call. You just have to be the person who defines the principles that guide every call across the org. That’s how IC leadership actually scales.