On Strategic Thinking

I never understood what people meant by “strategic thinking” or “being strategic.” I couldn’t accept the feedback when I heard “you need to think more strategically” as well. Nobody could explain what that “strategic” word meant. I finally understood the real meaning when I tried to build an engineering strategy myself. As I create an engineering strategy for my team and other teams, I have an answer to what it means to think strategically, especially after seeing how people think and approach strategy as we build it together. It became clear to me that the strategy is about aligning people—agreeing on which problems to solve and in which order to solve them. It is the exercise itself that matters: deciding which direction to go and creating a plan. A plan that everyone will stand behind, even if they disagree with (or don’t like) it. Being strategic means seeing the forest and its condition first and explicitly stating that the forest exists. Many people miss the forest for the…