Engineering Strategy Guide — Influencing Strategy in a Top-Down organization without authority

Table of contents 1. Top-down and Bottom-up culture 2. Do not try to change the culture 2.1. What to do instead 3. Execution eats strategy for breakfast 3.1. What to do instead 4. The meetings you’re not part of 4.1. What to do instead 4.2. You have other channels 5. The network 6. Iterate fast, keep stakeholders updated, and accept it will take a while 7. Embrace conflict 8. Stakeholder management 9. Take risks when you’re about to resign We are starting 2025, and it is the best moment to take the right time to design a coherent engineering strategy. Yet, having the right high-stake conversations, talk about the elephan in the room, and make though decisions isn’t easy. That’s why I’m writing this posts, to help you though your strategist journey. At the same time, I provide services to facilitate those conversations, and co-design your company’s engineering strategy within a week with a dedicated workshop. Know more at https://aleixmorgadas.dev/services/engineering-strategy. Feel free to reach me via DM, LinkedIn, or at hello at aleixmorgadas.dev A constant challenge the people I coach face is the not having the authority to design and drive the engineering strategy. They are part of a top-down organization, and unable to set the right resources for the strategy to succeed. During the coaching sessions, we work which kind of activities, artifacts, and including skills are needed to drive an engineering strategy without authority. In this article, I share some of those practices, and techniques for middle engineer leaders, like engineering managers or staff engineers, to overcome the key obstacles to influence the organization for good. 1. Top-down and Bottom-up culture A completely bottom-up culture is one where people and teams feel empowered to make their own decisions, and champion the initiatives they think are important. But, when those initiatives need support, approval, and like they slow down. On the other hand, in a top-down organization, initiatives happen on the top, and they are communicated, and any change on the direction needs higher-ups approval. A top-down organization can be transparent, share all the decision in front-doors in Slack channels, or all-hands sessions for example. Yet, those decisions are made by a closed group of people in the top of the hierarchy, the top-management team, or the C-suite. If you are reading this article, there is a high chance you are facing challenges to lead your own initiatives without higher ups approval, or even worse, your efforts being constantly overruled. You’re experiencing: 👉 Decisions happen in meetings that you are not part of. 👉 You follow the top-down decisions, propose an action plan, but then overruled without being part of the conversation. So, let’s see how can you influence the strategy in this adverse context. 2. Do not try to change the culture Aiming to enhance a company culture without authority is a recipe for burnout. Instead, adapt to it. Define a company’s culture is hard, but I found the next dimensions based on The Staff Engineering’s Path by Tanya Reilly to be a good starting point. Top-down vs Bottom-up Where do initiatives come from? A completely bottom-up culture is one where employees and teams feel empowered to make their own decisions and champion the initiatives they think are important. But, when those initiatives need support, they slow down. Oral vs Written What gets shared by word of mouth, and what gets shared written down? How much writing and review is involved in decisions? Features come with formal specifications, or you need to go to the person that made the feature? Back-doors vs Front-doors How do people in different groups talk to each other? Formal path of communication, via the teams' managers for example, or people can send friendly DMs cross teams? Secret vs Open How much does everyone know? Information is currency? Calendars are private? Slack channels are invitation only? Does everyone have access to everything? Even messy first drafts? Fast vs Deliberate Rapid decisions and pivot abruptly to try a new opportunity. Or you need to show that you've thought through the whole plan before start executing? Allocated vs Available How much time does everyone have? Are teams understaffed or overworked? Are you able to absorb new work as they appear, or does it end in the backlog and needs to get prioritized in the next cycle? (it can mean next quarter OKRs review) Let’s assume this describes your company culture. We can interpret it as a top-down, transparent, and bias towards action guided by product/business needs. Aiming to change the culture to be part of the conversation could mean that you aim to influence your company culture to become: If you aren’t part of the C-suite, with a huge effort by all the departments, which a set of coherent actions that sets a new company values, and all the support for all the effort needed to make this happen, including incentive systems like performance reviews, and expectations on the role definition… I don’t have many success cases of cultural change without leadership support. I’m building a product to measure company’s culture to help conscious leaders to make informed decisions to drive impact. You can join the beta at culturesensing.com 2.1. What to do instead The good thing here is, In order to influence the strategy, you don’t need to change the culture, you need to adapt to it. So, instead of opposing it, you need to embrace it, even though you consider it isn’t the best culture. Why? Because you cannot fight too many battles at the same time, if you’re changing the company culture, that deviates your attention from engineering strategy. If you consider it is the only way, OK, invest your time there, but then you have another (bigger) challenge. 3. Execution eats strategy for breakfast Another way to express it is about bias towards action. Bias towards action in an organization context means the ability to overcome the “analysis paralysis” that prevents people from making an informed decision, based on imperfect information, especially in the face of uncertainty. It has a lot of benefits, such as: Allow organizations to move fast. Overcomes overanalysis and procrastination. Bias towards action isn’t incompatible with strategy. Yet, I found this principle to be used to prevent bottom-up strategy, conflict, and crucial conversations that need to happen. Or at least used to stop being questioned too much by teams. Strategy shouldn’t lead into overanalysis or procrastination. Indeed, it helps you to move faster, when uncertainty is high. Because it’s not about moving fast on one task, but that all the actions we do are coherent to each other, instead of competing. 3.1 What to do instead Do not mention strategy. Make strategy work as part of your day-to-day job. Gather more context for your current task. Collect that information, and make it available as part of your journey. Record some decisions in a lean format, such as Architectural Decision Records, or notes in the OKRs definition in Notion/Confluence. Redirect people to those notes/principles when high stake actions are taking place to help people make decisions that are coherent with each other. Identify the key metrics that can (in)validate your assumptions, and make them visible during your 1:1s with your manager. Ask for which metrics are relevant business/product wise, and aim to make your actions backed up with the intentionality of impacting those from an engineering point of view. Here is good read to completement this point. 4. The meetings you’re not part of Not being part of the meeting it doesn’t mean that your ideas, needs, and so forth aren’t present. Your manager will need to communicate them in your behave. But so will others. A meeting doesn’t happen in the vacuum, it has a context, and it is part of a bigger vision. Each person within a meeting has into account: Their own needs. Their reports needs. The people they report to needs. The bigger picture, or goal, or whatever the context of the meeting is. As an orange sticky figure, you have your own needs, and you take into account your team needs as well. But here is the problematic, does your manager understand your needs? Does she have the right material to defend your needs, and the teams you lead needs? You can create some documentation, some slides, or even some dashboards, but you’re missing one thing. In that meeting isn’t about you, nor your needs. It is about the company needs beyond engineering. The conversation won’t be around we need of implementing Kafka, but how can we keep delivering value in these times of high uncertainty. Therefore, it is so hard to put the team needs into the table, because it isn’t speaking the language of business that takes place into that meeting. 4.1. What to do instead Focus on understanding the key meetings needs. Who will be attending? Who has more voice/influence? Which are their needs and concerns? Which is their leadership style? Are they gut based? Or do they need data evidence? How do they make decisions? Consensus? HiPPO makes the call? Are they having problems meeting the C-level expectations too? Which are the metrics that they value the most? Can you connect all those priorities, concerns, uncertainty, with specific team needs? When you understand all those drivers of decision-making, you show how you understand your manager’s needs, and co-prepare materials that addresses both, top-management needs AND the team needs. By co-creating this materials, your manager will be able to use them to influence in those meetings to do some steps forward in the engineering strategy. Be patient, because this takes time, and you’re heavy dependent on your manager’s influecing skills to make this happen. 4.2. You have other channels Not being part of the meeting it doen’t mean that you cannot contribute in other channels. Those meetings have resources, communication channels, and so forth. Aim to contribue to them by: Communicate proactivly in Slack channels. Add comments to Slides, Notion pages, Confluence pages, that are being used on those high-stake meetings. Add your input/point of view to Architecture-Decision Records. Find where the communication happens async, and contribute to those situations. 5. The network Create a network within your company to understand their needs, their career expectations, and build a healthy relationship with people before you need it. Some people see this as politics. IMHO, as long you don’t influnce in bad faith, you set a clear expectations, and you take into account people to build together, I see as part of the manager’s job. TL;DR: It’s a good thing, and you should aim to create a healthy and robust network within your company. Why? Because it will help you understand other people needs, their manager needs, and create a compelling vision to address their needs, and their boss needs, and also including your needs for a collaborative strategy. It will help you a create a we strategy and not an us vs you strategy.’ So, you can move from “We need to invest on DevEx because 🥔” to “Improving our cycle time is critical for deliver sooner and safer, we see product not meeting their goals, and continue with the current approach won’t help but make it worse. We consider investing on this specific area to be a safe bet, and we will measure the impact based on X metric for this amount of time”. Hopefully, by the time you are making this statement, all the parties understands why you are proposing that, how that will affect them, and you should have bigger support to drive those initiatives without impling overanalysing, or big intiatives. Achive that by iterative and incremental improvements, and having a fluid and contant communication with the right stakeholders. 5.1. Leverage skip-level meetings A skip-level meeting is a meeting with people you don’t directly report to or people that don’t report directly to you. This works in multiple directions. Start meeting with people that has influence to your area beyond your closer cycle. People like Heads of Product, and so on that aren’t close to you in your day to day, but their input matters. 6. Iterate fast, keep stakeholders updated, and accept it will take a while As I wrote in the Engineering Strategy Guide - Introduction, a strategy is composed of 4 points. Understanding: Help us to identify the main blockers, risks, and opportunities that could prevent us to overcome the high stake business challenge. It helps us to focus on the important aspect of the challenge without feeling overwhelmed with information. Direction: A guideline to help people understand where to focus. Coherent actions: A set of coherent actions to accomplish the direction. They are coherent to one another, and they add up instead of compete. Business and context: Those three components live within a context of the business purpose and organization context. They need to directly address those business needs. You don’t need an strategy to be big nor inspirational. You can keep it local, boring, and that addresses a high-stake challenge taking into account the business needs, and the team pains. So, don’t make big sessions but small ones often. Create a place where you will keep all the information available, like in a Notion or Miro. Add the context and your initial diagnosis. Adopt the current strategy, even if it’s an unspoken one, and define how people are measuring its success. Record the small actions being done to make this strategy happen. Redirect people to the document (no need to call it strategy, engineering principles looks like a good name), and help people to share: If they are able to apply those principles/direction. Note down what works and what doesn’t work. Iterate the document, by showing those insights with your manager, and ask for support for those things you cannot do. Show regurarlly the progress you’re doing, and ask for clarifications on what makes sense, what they want more of, and what they want less of. Adapt your communidation, and stratetgy accordantly. Hopefully, some of those insights will be part of the meetings that decisions take place. Involve your manager when it is necessary, not for everything. If you ask people for an opinion, they will have one, and they will fight for it regardless if it matters or not. When you have insights that either the strategy isn’t working, and you need higher-up commitment. In that moment, you have enough documentation, you know what’s important and your top-management need. Now, you are in a good position to influence the strategy, directly or indirectly. 7. Embrace conflict Are you avoiding conflict? Are you using techniques like “yes, and” that aims to create a sense of agreement but you’re not really agreeing? Strategy is conflict. Therefore, you need to learn to be OK with it, I don’t ask you to be comfortable, but at least not avoid it. Why is it conflict? Because strategy cannot suit everyone, and you need to make compromises. Conflict needs to be practiced, and you learn by doing. Yet, having some resources can help you navigate them better. Here some books that helped me to navigate better conflict: Radical Candor by Kim Scott. Radical Respect by Kim Scott. To understand the nuances of psychological safety. A perspective missing in the first book. Non Violent Communication A Language of Life by Marshall B. Rosenberg. Understand how can you communicate your needs better, by ackowledging others needs without attacking, nor being unable to put your needs first. Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High by Kerry Patterson The Trusted Advisor by David H. Maister The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni On the other hand, avoid non productive conflict. That will drain your energy for no real purpose. 8. Stakeholder management You need to master stakeholder management. Be sure that you: Understand their needs, and they acknowledge that you understood them. A good way is to keep a record of why certain decisions were made in the past. Knowing the past will help you set for success in to the future. And it is quite probable that that information isn’t documented. Keep the information available. Proactively communicate changes, and risks. Consult regurarly. Involve stakeholders in decision making. Address concerns first and quickly. Constantly adapt as needed and you learn. Check regurarly if you are communicating enough. Keep communicating! 9. Take risks when you’re about to resign At some point, and after trying multiple times to make an impact without success, you have considered, or you are considering it right now, resigning, and looking for a new opportunity out there. That’s legit. Before you do that, let me suggest you a last initiative. Aim to design, and execute an engineering strategy that you consider that makes sense, that’s executable, and measurable in a reasonable time frame (no more than 3 months). No need to ask for permission, better ask for forgiveness. Because: If it works, you learned. And you can resign later if you want to. If it doesn’t work, and they fire you. But the key takeaway is that you will learn. And it is the moment that you can take more personal risks, because you are putting your job security at risk by taking bolder decisions. Do not confuse this by making riskier decisions for the company and your colleagues. That’s not responsible. How that will influence you? You will stop doing expected work, you will prioritize some stuff over others, and you will miss deadlines. But let me tell you something 👇 Making time to think, understand the context, making bold decisions that lead to conflict, and learn from them is what makes a good engineering strategist. So, start practicing in a place that you have few things to lose. If you’re lucky, you can practice it in your organization without putting your job at risk, but that’s not the context for everyone, unfortunately. Navingating a top-down organization is hard, and you don’t need to do the journey alone. I help leaders like you though tailored coaching sessions based on your needs and goals. By only explaining and understanding your challenge, you are already half though the solution. Schedule a 30min call using the following link.