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Good Strategy Structure

3 min readStatus:Seedling

Core Idea

Most engineering “strategies” are lists of aspirations with no diagnosis and no guiding policies. Rumelt’s kernel — Diagnosis, Guiding Policies, Coherent Actions — defines the structure that makes strategy actionable.

Most engineering “strategies” are not strategies at all. They are aspiration lists (“we will be world-class”) or goal inventories with no connective tissue. Richard Rumelt calls this bad strategy, and Will Larson applies the diagnosis directly to engineering leadership.

Rumelt’s Kernel of Good Strategy

A good strategy has three interlocking parts:

  • Diagnosis: A clear-eyed assessment of the specific challenge. Not “we need to scale” but “our deployment pipeline averages 4 hours because 47 integration tests flake on every run, blocking daily releases.” A good diagnosis names the constraint, not just the symptom.

  • Guiding Policies: Rules and principles that address the diagnosis by shaping decision-making without specifying exact actions. Example: “We will not add new integration tests until flake rate is below 5%. We will invest in parallel pipeline stages as the primary path to speed.”

  • Coherent Actions: Specific, sequenced steps that implement the guiding policies — mutually reinforcing, not pulling in different directions. Example: “Q1 — one engineer dedicated to flaky test elimination. Q2 — implement parallel build stages.”

What Bad Strategy Looks Like in Engineering

  • Aspirations masquerading as strategy: “We will be the best engineering team in our space”
  • Goal lists with no connective tissue: each objective unrelated to a structural constraint
  • Guiding policies that don’t address the diagnosis
  • Conflating strategy with vision — vision describes the destination; strategy navigates the specific terrain

The Most Commonly Missed Step: Diagnosis

Larson observes that most engineering strategies fail at the Diagnosis step. Engineering managers are optimists by training — they diagnose “we need more resources” rather than naming the structural obstacle: the architectural coupling, the process bottleneck, the knowledge concentration.

Without an honest diagnosis, guiding policies float free of reality, and coherent actions become impossible to sequence.

Applying the Kernel

  1. Name the single hardest thing — the constraint that makes the goal difficult
  2. Define 2–4 policies that directly address that constraint
  3. Sequence concrete actions consistent with each other and with the policies
  4. Verify: do the actions implement the policies? Do the policies address the diagnosis?

Sources

  • Rumelt, Richard P. (2011). Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters. Crown Business. ISBN: 978-0-307-88623-1.

    • Chapters 1–5 define the kernel and identify hallmarks of bad strategy

  • Larson, Will (2019). An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management. Stripe Press. ISBN: 978-1-7322651-8-9.

    • Chapter 5.4: applies Rumelt’s kernel to engineering leadership

  • Porter, Michael E. (1996). “What Is Strategy?” Harvard Business Review, November–December 1996, Vol. 74, No. 6, pp. 61–78.

    • Foundational distinction between operational effectiveness and strategy

  • Mintzberg, Henry, Bruce Ahlstrand, and Joseph Lampel (1998). Strategy Safari. Free Press. ISBN: 978-0-684-84743-7.

    • Surveys ten schools of strategy thought; contextualises the design school from which Rumelt’s kernel derives

  • Lafley, A.G. and Roger L. Martin (2013). Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works. Harvard Business Review Press. ISBN: 978-1-4221-8739-6.

    • “Five choices” strategy cascade; practitioner implementation model complementing Rumelt’s kernel

Note

This content was drafted with assistance from AI tools for research, organization, and initial content generation. All final content has been reviewed, fact-checked, and edited by the author to ensure accuracy and alignment with the author’s intentions and perspective.

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