As we grow Reforge, we've started developing a line of programs for engineering leaders. The first was Scaling Product Delivery. Our most recent one is Technical Strategy, created by Harsh Sinha (CTO at Wise, ex-PayPal, eBay) and Bryan Dove (ex-CEO at Skyscanner, Eng Leader at Amazon, Microsoft).
I find this topic interesting because most of the time when people talk about strategy, they are referring to either company strategy or product strategy. But as Harsh and Bryan point out in How to Overcome the Technical Strategy Spiral, great companies our built on great technical strategy for a few reasons:
Great Tech Strategy Enables Speed
At the lowest level, engineering teams are making a million tradeoffs that either create future friction or future speed. A good technical strategy enables future speed for your organization. This means your company can get farther, faster than others.
All Defensibility Has Technical Roots
There are different types of defensibility, and all the long lasting ones are enabled by technical strategy. Zoom has differentiated on audio/video quality. It has separated them from a crowded space. This was enabled by deep technical strategy. Data network effects in products like Pinterest or Spotify are enabled by technical strategy around personalization.
"No matter what type of defensibility a company has, they need to keep innovating to maintain that moat and defend against competition. The best, hardest-to-cross moats are technology-driven. When tech leaders cannot participate effectively in creating these moats, companies lose defensibility."
Bad Tech Strategy Leads To Degrading Product Market Fit
In the Reforge Product Strategy program, Casey Winters (CPO at Eventbrite) talks about how Product Market Fit is not static:
"The expectations of the customer continue to increase and change over time, and in fact, total satisfaction is likely an asymptote impossible to achieve. So what is product/market fit then? Product/market fit is not when customers stop complaining and are fully satisfied. They’ll never stop complaining. They’ll never be fully satisfied. Product/market fit is when they stop leaving. Represented visually, customer expectations are an asymptote a product experience can rarely hope to achieve, but product/market fit is a line a product can jump over and try to maintain a higher slope than over time." - Casey Winters, Reforge Partner and CPO at Eventbrite
In other words, product-market fit requires more work just to maintain over time. If a company does not have engineering leaders good at technical strategy, they rack up the wrong kinds of technical debt and, as a result, can't focus on continued innovation and improvements.
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