Heartbeats: keeping strategies alive

You can't just one-and-done them. You need to show proof.

One of the key tasks when it comes to leadership of a large team is being able to define and communicate a strategy. When strategies are done well, they are a powerful tool for aligning individuals that are many steps removed from you: they can make decisions that gel with the global maxima, without needing your input, by applying the strategic principles you set out.

However, creating a strategy is not a one-and-done thing: you need to continually keep it alive and relevant, else it will be forgotten about.

tl;dr

An example.

Let's pretend that at the beginning of the year you wrote and communicated one of the best engineering strategies that your company has seen in a long time.

It clearly lays out the goals, the key initiatives, and the metrics that you'll use to measure success in your department. A read of your strategy shows that it's clear that the main focus is to build a stable platform, drive up quality, and invest in the long term, and therefore you're going to invest in a lot of foundational work over the coming year. Nice.

Putting this strategy together was a serious amount of work. You consulted with your team, you talked to your peers, and went through multiple rounds of feedback to sure that everybody felt represented and empowered by what it contained. You made sure that it was indeed a strategy, and not a prescriptive plan: careful attention was paid to making sure that it was a guiding document, and not a list of tasks.

You even tested it against a few hypothetical scenarios to make sure that it was robust: what if you had to cut your budget in half? What if you had to double your team size? What if you had to pivot to a new product area? However, it still made sense: your strategy showed that stability and quality of your platform was the most important thing, and that all of your initiatives were aligned to that goal, no matter what.

Your strategy touches upon four key themes. Here's what they are:

1. Stability: You're going to invest in a lot of foundational work to make sure that your platform is stable and reliable. Notably, this means that you will be better measuring, and scrutinising, the availability of your key services to 99.99% uptime. This has slipped recently with some high-profile outages.

2. Quality: The quality of your platform is going to be a key focus. App store ratings have decreased to 3.5 stars in the last year, and you're going to make sure that they're back up to 4.5 stars by the end of the year.

3. Automation: The release cycle of your platform is too slow, and releases are too error-prone. You will dedicate significant engineering resources to improving this.

4. Skilling up: Although the team has grown significantly in the last year, it is clear that there are too few staff that have the breadth of skills to contribute to the foundational work that you need to do. By careful staffing of your teams, and by investing in training, you will make sure that you have the right skills to deliver on your strategy.

You were particularly proud of the video that you recorded: your talk was pretty rad, if you do say so yourself. You even got a few compliments on your choice of background music.

However, now that it's been a while since you've published it, you're beginning to wonder whether it made an impact. You didn't get that many questions about it when it went out. You'd kind of hoped that you'd get a few more comments or questions, given the amount of work that it took to put together.

And get this: it seems some people have forgotten the content already.

For example, just today you were in a meeting where a team was clearly not making infrastructure decisions for the long term: they were considering shipping a new database to production without sufficient load testing. That same mindset caused a major incident last year. You're pretty sure that if they had read your strategy, they would have known that this was not the right thing to do.

So, you scroll back through your emails. You rewatch the video, and yeah, it's still engaging.

However, it seems only a small percentage of your team has actually watched it. Less than 20%, in fact.

Hmm.

Why aren't your engineers reading your emails? And let's face it: have you ever glossed over that was more than a few paragraphs long because you were busy at the time?

Come on, be honest.

Maybe the problem is you.

The Heartbeat

You need to keep your strategy alive.

Too many good strategies get written once and then forgotten about, collecting digital dust in a document somewhere. Creating and communicating the strategy is only the first step of the work: you also need to show how it's being used and how it's relevant to the decisions that are being made.

One way to do this is to create a regular heartbeat for your strategy. The duration of this heartbeat is up to you, but aligning with one of the larger cycles of the year is a good bet: for example, perhaps you could do it quarterly or biannually.

The heartbeat is a communication that looks back at the strategy, recaps the key points, and then shows how it has been implemented in the time since the last heartbeat. It's a chance to show how the strategy is living and relevant, and that it's not just a document that was written once and then placed on the shelf.

How you decide to construct your heartbeat is up to you, but here's an example of what you might include:

1. Recap: A brief recap of the key themes of the strategy, linking back to the original document. This is a chance to remind people of what the strategy is about, and would cover the four main themes that we discussed earlier. Imagine that you're writing this for someone who has never seen the strategy before, and you're trying to get them up to speed.

2. Progress: A summary of the progress that has been made against the key initiatives. One way of doing this is underneath each of the themes to enumerate the projects that have been completed, including their measurement of succes. For example, under the "Stability" theme, you might list that the project to have multi-region failover has been completed, and this prevented a major outage last month. Lots of links here go a long way: to tickets, dashboards, the product, and design documents.

3. Impact: A summary of the impact that the strategy has had on the team. For example, in this strategy, you might focus on the overall uptime of the platform, the app store ratings, the release cycle time, and the number of engineers that have been trained in new skills. Ensure this part is data-driven: show the before and after, and make sure that you're using the metrics that you defined in the strategy.

4. Staffing: A snapshot of what the staffing looks like right now. For example, if you create charts or tables that show the distribution of seniority, skills, project focus, and so on, you can show how the team is evolving to meet the needs of the strategy, and call out any anomalies and how you plan to address them. For example, you callout that your ratio of backend to frontend engineers is non-optimal, and detail your plans to ramp up hiring in the next quarter.

5. Changes to the strategy: It's entirely reasonable to amend your main strategy each heartbeat, if you need to. In fact, it's an ideal time to do it. Perhaps you've learned something new, or the market has changed, or you've had a major incident that has caused you to re-evaluate your priorities. This is a chance to show that the strategy is a living document, and that it's not set in stone. Call out what you're changing, and why, then update the main document.

6. Looking forward: Give your audience a brief preview of what you think will be in the next heartbeat. You can describe which projects that are underway that you're expecting to complete, and what you're expecting the impact to be. Not only is this exciting, it also holds you and your team accountable to the goals that you've set.

Getting It Out There

When it comes to communicating the heartbeat, a written document can form the core communication (you can archive each one as time goes on), but you might also want to record a video, include it in a town hall meeting with live Q&A, or even get individual teams to present their progress as detailed in your update.

The key is to make sure that the heartbeat is seen by as many people as possible, and that it's clear that the strategy is your collective compass, as evidenced by the progress that you're making against it.

So even though defining the strategy from scratch is the hardest part, keeping it alive with regular heartbeats is where you bring everyone else along through proof.

It's a chance to show that the strategy is not just an academic exercise from the leadership canon, but a practical tool that is making a difference to the team. It's a chance to reflect, to celebrate, and to keep the team aligned.

Give it a go. I guarantee that you'll see a difference.