Book Review: Crafting Engineering Strategy by Will Larson

I recently read Crafting Engineering Strategy, a book by Will Larson.

I had previously found incredible value in Will’s book, Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track and have followed his writing through his blog for quite a while. I attribute much of my success in being promoted to a Staff+ role to the ideas and guidance in the Staff Engineer book, and it is the first place I send others who come to me with questions about the role.

In Crafting Engineering Strategy I have found the next catalyst for deepening my role as a technical leader. The concepts explored in this book filled gaps in my skill set that I could see in my periphery, but could not quite resolve on my own. This book helped me put tangible structure around my approach to strategy and clarified nuanced aspects of strategy work that I could always communicate but struggled to put into practice.

I’m a Staff Engineer - Should I read this book?

Yes, but don’t start here.

If strategy work interests you as part of a Staff+ / prospective Staff+ role, start with Richard Rumelt’s Good Strategy, Bad Strategy and Will Larson’s earlier book, Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track.

These are fantastic (if not a touch abstract) primers to strategy work. For me, these books laid the foundation while Crafting Engineering Strategy made it all click.

Is strategy work actually important?

I personally think that a Staff Engineer with a nose for strategy can provide incredible organizational value. That said, I don’t know that I feel as convicted that all Staff+ Engineers must write strategy. There are a lot of ways to be an impactful Staff+ Engineer, so if strategy work does not energize you or if your organization is sufficiently large that there is little room for you to provide value in strategy work, then you may not find as much value here.

We all participate in strategy in some form as technical leaders - the work you decide to prioritize has an implicit strategy. The frameworks you adopt, the architecture you choose, and the ways you support your team and organization all follow some strategy. It may not be written down, but it exists.

This book helps to put rigor behind that strategy, defining clear “stages” of strategy development and lifecycle (discussed below) and suggesting tool kits for refinement. These concepts elevate strategy from feeling performative or shallow to thoughtful, intelligent, and actionable.

What will I take away from this book?

The first few chapters of this book describe who might consider taking on strategy work and how your level of influence might affect your “strategy altitude” - that is, do you have the influence to make a broad proclamation, or does your strategy need to be written permissively and with a more narrow scope. This discussion is balanced by emphasis on when it makes sense to pause strategy work to retrospect on past struggles or more deeply understand organizational dynamics.

Chapters 5 through 10 go on to suggest steps for building engineering strategy. These chapters are the core of the book, and the content that I found most valuable for supplementing my existing understanding of writing strategy.

These chapters discuss five suggested steps for crafting your engineering strategy: exploration, diagnosis, refining, setting policy, and operations. Each step in this process is an input to the next, helping to ground strategy in actionable work. This series of chapters helped me realize that I was (typically) approaching strategy incorrectly. Introspecting a bit as I read, I realized that more often than not I was approaching strategy with some pre-computed solution already in mind, and building my strategy around that bias (referred to in the book as “early anchoring”).

This is, obviously, not ideal. I might luck into a working solution, but how can I be sure it is the correct solution? How can I be sure there aren’t solutions in my periphery that I didn’t explore thoroughly enough? The process above helps patch that gap, but introduces some additional questions as well - how do I establish and refine a strategy once I have one in mind?

Chapters 13 - 15 propose three valuable tools - strategy testing, systems modeling, and Wardley maps. This series of chapters puts a polish on the process proposed above. Make no mistake, these tools require practice to drive successful outcomes, but their framing within the strategy process brings it all together.

Final thoughts

Will Larson’s Crafting Engineering Strategy puts an approachable face on engineering strategy work. Before reading this book I felt that I generally understood the shape of good and bad strategy (Rumelt’s book lays this foundation for me), but I struggled to best identify when strategy was valuable, how to tailor strategy for my audience and level of influence, and most importantly, how to keep strategy on the rails.

Crafting Engineering Strategy filled those gaps for me. It does this by suggesting a structured approach to crafting strategy, with industry proven tools to support the process. Where descriptions aren’t enough, Larson’s proven formula of presenting grounded case studies and examples demonstrates the process.

What I value most about Larson’s work is this grounding in real world interviews and case studies. The examples provided in this book are what elevates the subject for me, providing clear examples of application across very real topics (service migration, LLM adoption, and private equity). This succeeds where the alternatives fail - demonstrating not just the final outcomes, but how we got there.

I would strongly recommend this book to any technical leader looking to provide value through engineering strategy!