Strategic Inaccuracy
Recently one of the engineers at my company wanted to chat. They are earlier in their career and wanted to learn how to think more strategically. I’m certainly no expert here, but there’s a nugget of truth here that helped them, so I am re-sharing it in hopes that it helps you. The conversation went something like this:
Them: How did you know that the company was going to build the new product this year? The architectural changes you made last year made that a lot easier. Why did you make those changes and not others?
Me: I did not know. Last year the old product was struggling to find market fit. Everyone saw that. So I imagined what might happen. There were a few different paths we could have taken — most likely building some new product in some new market, but selling off the company or even the old product suddenly getting a ton of traction were possibilities.
What was common between all of these imaginary futures? That we didn’t really need the product-specific parts of the current architecture.
We’d likely use the core tech in new products, regardless of what the market was. Any company buying us is probably interested in the core tech that nobody else can do. And if the old product takes off, the core tech is the bit we would have to scale.
