How Staff+ Engineers Can Develop Strategic Thinking

In today’s rapidly evolving tech landscape, the role of Staff+ engineers is critical, extending well beyond technical expertise to include strategic vision and influential leadership. Staff+ engineers serve as the vital link between engineering teams and executive management, positioning them to drive innovation, guide technical direction, and help shape the future of their organizations.

This article outlines my personal framework for cultivating strategic thinking at any career stage, with a focus on Staff+ engineers. It draws on nearly two decades of experience in building platforms, products, and teams across diverse areas like cloud infrastructure and networking. I’ve worked with companies of all shapes and sizes, including hyperscalers, pre-IPO startups, post-IPO startups, and large enterprises.

Whether you’re an established Staff+ engineer or someone with aspirations to grow into this role, this article offers the tools, perspectives, and insights you need to navigate your journey to greater influence and impact.

Why Strategic Thinking?

Strategic thinking is about developing a mindset that focuses on long-term success for your organization. How do you achieve that? By constantly adapting to new circumstances, fostering innovation, and intentionally strengthening this muscle over time.

Consider the cautionary tales of Kodak and Blockbuster. Kodak, once the pioneer in photography, failed to recognize the rise of digital photography, leading to its eventual downfall. Similarly, Blockbuster clung too tightly to its physical model of renting movies and missed the shift toward online streaming. In 2000, Blockbuster even had the chance to acquire Netflix but declined. The rest, as they say, is history.

As engineers, we’re naturally good at critical thinking. We analyze data, break down problems logically, and find patterns that lead us to solutions. When faced with complex challenges, we also tap into creative thinking. We go beyond the obvious, connecting the dots and thinking outside the box to find innovative solutions.

But strategic thinking takes it a step further. It’s a muscle that requires intentional practice. It builds on your critical and creative thinking skills, but it also brings in a long-term perspective. When you exercise strategic thinking, you’re ensuring that the decisions you make today will stand the test of time.

Whether you’re making a technical decision for your team or setting direction for your entire organization, your credibility is shaped by how well you apply your judgment based on experience. It’s not just about avoiding mistakes but learning from them and using those lessons to make better decisions in the future.

Strategic thinking also involves recognizing patterns – both your own and others’ mistakes – and using those insights to inform your decisions. As you build this skill, you’ll establish yourself as a subject matter expert (SME) or trusted advisor within your organization.

The result? You’ll not only be driving your own success but also helping your organization innovate and make smarter, more impactful bets/decisions. It’s a win-win-win.

Good and Poor Strategies

In his book Good Strategy Bad Strategy, Richard Rumelt outlines the core of a good strategy, which consists of three key components: diagnosis, guiding policy, and coherent action.

Diagnosis is about understanding the problem you’re solving – what it is, why it matters, and who you’re solving it for. This requires research and a deep understanding of the situation. Once you’ve diagnosed the problem, the next step is to define your guiding policy. This is your set of principles, values, and strategic pillars that guide your actions and decisions. It should be something enduring and not easily swayed by changing circumstances. Finally, you need coherent action – a strategy without action is just a concept. It’s the clear, decisive steps that translate your strategy into reality.

Let’s look at what are examples of some poor strategies.

1. Focusing Too Much on “How” and Not Enough on “Why”

One common pitfall is starting with the “how” – the execution – without first fully understanding the “why” or the “what”. When this happens, strategies often become prescriptive, overly detailed, and unmotivating, turning into mere to-do lists.

Take, for example, a situation at one of the companies I worked for, where we were trying to design a return-to-work policy after COVID. People got fixated on the “how”: Should we provide flexible desks, food, or office events? They started to focus on tracking attendance and creating a “fun” experience. But we missed the critical question: Why were we doing this? What was the actual need for a hybrid or remote work policy? Without addressing the deeper reasons – such as employee well-being, work-life balance, and the shift in work culture – the solution was ineffective. Offering perks like free food and nice office spaces wasn’t enough to draw people back to the office. Without understanding the why and considering different employee personas (e.g., lab workers who had no flexibility), the strategy ended up feeling top-down, shallow, and largely irrelevant.

2. Missing the “What” in the Execution

Another poor strategy emerges when teams understand the “why” (the problem) and even consider the “how” (the solution), but fail to execute in a way that fits the company’s specific context.

A common example is the push to improve developer productivity. Teams dive into the data – using DORA metrics, SPACE metrics, and surveys – to identify areas for improvement. But often, what’s missing is the crucial step of understanding how to apply these solutions to your specific environment. Are you a startup scaling rapidly, or a stable enterprise with a legacy infrastructure? Without tailoring your approach to your company’s unique context, the strategy becomes too high-level, sounding great in theory but falling short in practice. For instance, if you’re adopting a new CI/CD tool, it may work wonders for one company but fail to deliver meaningful results if the underlying needs and challenges of your organization aren’t properly addressed. You’ll end up asking, “Has this really moved the needle in terms of deployment speed or developer experience?”

3. Too Tactical, Too Reactive

A third example of poor strategy is when you begin with a solid understanding of the “why” and start executing, but the strategy becomes too tactical, reactive, or short-term focused.

One of my teams once identified a growing tech debt problem and jumped straight into tackling it. They executed quickly, fixing bugs, doing a hack day, and addressing the low-hanging fruit. While they saw some immediate wins, they missed a critical step: What were our architectural principles? What long-term vision were we working toward? How would these quick fixes hold up when new business use cases arose? The result? When a new business case emerged, all the effort put into clearing tech debt became irrelevant, and we had to start over.

A well-balanced strategy requires thoughtful planning and execution across all three components – diagnosis, guiding policy, and coherent action. As a Staff or Staff+ engineer, whether you’re crafting a technical strategy or contributing to broader organizational goals, it’s essential to dedicate time to ensure your strategy is comprehensive, practical, and aligned with both short-term needs and long-term success.

Strategic Thinking Framework

Here’s my strategy cheat sheet, the approach I’ve used when partnering with my tech leads to build successful strategies.

The first step is diagnostics and insights. You start by understanding your customers. And no, there’s rarely just one customer. In my case, we have data engineers, platform providers, product engineers, and of course, the end customers who pay for their Netflix subscriptions.

Next, it’s critical to identify the hot spots – the pain points and challenges. This requires a lot of diligence and direct conversations with your customers. I personally conducted 50 interviews with key stakeholders before I even started drafting the strategy for my organization. My tech lead joined every single one of those interviews, which gave us a shared understanding of the issues and what we were really trying to solve.

At this stage, you’ll start uncovering diagnostics and insights. Your customers may say they need something fast, but remember, customers often don’t know exactly what they want. As a leader or a staff engineer, it’s your job to synthesize all the data and generate actionable insights.

Don’t forget to talk to your peers in the industry, too. While you should never share your IP, understanding where the industry is heading is essential. Too often, people get trapped in their own silos and lose sight of the bigger picture.

Another useful tool at this stage is a build vs. buy analysis. Before you commit to a strategic bet, think about what your company really needs. Are you in a build mode, or can you find an off-the-shelf solution that fits your needs?

Once you’ve gathered your insights, it’s time to define your guiding principles – the pillars of your strategy and your long-term vision. These will be unique to your situation, but generally, you’ll identify two or three tenets that will help sustain your strategy over the next 12 to 18 months.

A strategy is only as good as its execution. Your inputs will shape the quality of the roadmap, and you can significantly influence how risk is mitigated across the business. Don’t think of this as someone else’s job. Even if you’re not the one directly driving the strategy, as a staff engineer, you have a significant role to play in shaping it.

Finally, multiple winning strategies can exist. So, how do you know if your strategy is working? That’s where metrics, KPIs, and goals come into play. You need to define leading and lagging indicators up front, so you can assess every six months whether your strategic bets are still the right ones. Don’t be afraid to say “no” or pivot if the data points you in a new direction. That’s how I approach strategic decisions. While not every decision requires deep rigor, for critical decisions, this level of analysis ensures you’re making the right call for the long term.

Balancing Risk and Innovation

For risk and innovation, you need to understand what your organization values the most. Everybody has a culture memo and a set of tenets they follow, but these are part of unsaid rules, something that every new hire will learn by the first week of their onboarding, which is not written out loud and clear.

In my experience, there are different kinds of organizations. Some care about execution, like results above everything, top line, bottom line. Others care about data-driven decision-making, customer sentiment, and keeping adapting. There are others who care about storytelling and relationships. What does this really mean? If you fail to influence, if you fail to tell a story about what ideas you have, what you’re really trying to do, to build trust and relationships, you may not succeed in that environment, because it’s not enough for you to be smart and knowing it all.

You also need to know how to convey your ideas and influence people. When you talk about innovation, there are companies that really pride themselves on experimentation, staying ahead of the curve. You can look at this by how many of them have an R&D department, and how much funding they put into that. Then, what’s their role in the open-source community, and how much they contribute towards it.

Once you figure that out, as a staff-plus engineer, here are some of the tools in your toolkit that you can use to start mitigating risk.

It is way better to spend two days on rapid prototyping and letting the results enhance the learning and arriving at a conclusion, than months of meetings trying to make somebody agree on something. You should understand the risk appetite. If you want to go ahead with big, hairy ideas, or you are not afraid to bring up spicy topics, but if your organization doesn’t have that risk appetite, you are doing yourself a disservice. There are ideathons and hackathons. As staff-plus engineers, you can lead by example, and you can champion those things.

I want to extend the framework of knows and unknowns a bit, because, to me, it’s really two axes. There’s knowledge and there is awareness.

Let’s start with the case where you know both: you have the knowledge and you have the awareness. Those are facts, your strengths, things that you leverage and build upon, in any risk innovation management situation.

Then let’s talk about known unknowns. This is where you really do not know how to tackle the unknown, but you know that there are some issues upfront. These are assumptions or hypotheses that you’re making, but you need data to validate them. You can do things like rapid prototyping or lookaheads or pre-mortems, which can help you validate your assumptions.

Many of us suffer from subconscious and unconscious biases, where you have the knowledge and inherently believe in something that’s part of your belief system but lack the awareness that this is what is driving it. In this situation, especially for staff-plus engineers, it can get lonely up there. It’s important to create a peer group that you trust and get feedback from them. It’s okay for you to be wrong sometimes.

Finally, there are unknown unknowns. This is like the Wild West. This is where all the surprises happen. At Netflix, we do a few things like chaos engineering, where we inject chaos into the system. We also invest a lot in innovation to stay ahead of these things rather than having these surprises catch us.

Real-World Examples

Over the course of my career, I’ve had the opportunity to work with over 100 staff-plus engineers and thousands of engineers in total – whether through hiring, mentoring, or collaborating on projects. In addition to this, I conducted interviews with over 50 staff-plus engineers, all practitioners of the strategic frameworks I’ve been discussing. To gather insights, I purposefully sought out engineers from diverse companies and organizational structures, knowing that a range of experiences would offer the most valuable lessons.

What struck me most was the diversity of both the impact and experience of these staff-plus engineers. They come in all forms, with different approaches, challenges, and successes. I’ve compiled the key patterns, tips, and anecdotes I learned from these conversations. Here are a few examples:

1. Distinguished Engineer: Building Planet-Scale Systems

This engineer works on some of the most complex distributed systems on the planet. Their impact isn’t just felt within their organization but extends across the entire industry. One of the most significant takeaways from our conversation was their advice: “Don’t DDoS yourself“. In other words, it’s easy to become overwhelmed with decisions and tasks. The key is learning to prioritize and make the hard decisions that truly matter.

They also emphasized that engineers are uniquely skilled at spotting BS – because we are close to the problems. Leaders may have been engineers at one point, but we’re the ones who really understand what works and what doesn’t. To truly excel in a strategic role, this engineer suggested expanding your circle of influence beyond just engineering – talk to legal, finance, and compliance. These teams offer vital business context that will help you align your work with the company’s goals.

One final piece of advice: Trust is earned, not bought. You can hire experience, but you can’t hire trust. Building that trust is critical to being an influential leader. And remember: even as you step into a more strategic role, never lose sight of being a builder. Don’t become a Slack hero – stay connected to the craft that made you successful in the first place.

2. Principal Engineer: Leading Organization-Wide Projects

This engineer is responsible for leading projects that influence over 1,000 engineers. What they learned over time is that, while technical excellence is paramount, relationships matter just as much. Early on, they struggled with getting people on board with their strategy because they hadn’t built the necessary relationships first. Their attempts to drive progress were seen as overstepping or even “steamrolling”, because they didn’t take the time to understand the people side of things.

Building relationships and gaining trust within the organization are foundational to executing any strategic initiative. Only by fostering strong connections can you truly influence the direction of a project or team.

3. Site Reliability Engineer (SRE): Balancing Technical and People Strategy

SREs face a unique challenge: not only must they be deeply technical, but they must also manage the people aspect of strategy. One key piece of advice from an SRE leader was the importance of multiplying your influence. Recognize that you can’t do everything on your own – your ability to strategically leverage your time and influence others is just as important as the technical work you contribute.

They also recommended IC-manager career pendulum swings – a concept where you switch between individual contributor (IC) and managerial roles to develop a diverse skill set. This shift helps build empathy for leadership while honing your problem-solving skills.

4. Depth Engineer: Maximizing Time and Impact

This engineer is deeply focused on solving hard, specialized problems. Even in such a technical role, they recognized the importance of strategic thinking. Their advice was simple but powerful: understand what your organization truly wants. Observe the people around you, learn from role models, and align your work with the larger organizational objectives.

Another critical insight they shared was thinking of engineering time as currency – how you spend your time directly impacts the value you generate. As a tech lead or staff-plus engineer, it’s essential to ask yourself: How am I spending my time? Is it spent on high-leverage activities that truly move the needle? Moreover, communication and writing skills are indispensable for pitching your ideas effectively to different audiences.

Influencing Organizational Culture

Influencing the culture around you should be a deliberate and intentional effort. Think about how you can lead by example and multiply the impact of your actions by empowering others. One of the most effective ways to do this is by partnering with leadership.

I actively invite my senior engineering tech leads to sit at the table during critical discussions – whether it’s about promotions, talent decisions, or other key conversations. By including them in these dialogues, I ensure that they’re not just passive participants but active contributors to shaping the direction of our organization. This involvement helps them take ownership of the culture we are building and gives them the opportunity to influence it in a meaningful way.

The Role of Leadership

When it comes to empowering staff-plus engineers, leadership is key.

As a leader, it’s your responsibility to provide the right business context and technical context. This means bringing your staff engineers into discussions, seeking their input, and most importantly, giving them a seat at the table during critical conversations. Whether it’s about promotions or executive-level strategy meetings, staff engineers should feel they have the opportunity to contribute meaningfully. Protect their time, so they can focus on making those contributions count.

Additionally, it’s your role to pressure test strategies. If your technical leadership is putting forward a set of strategies, it’s up to you to evaluate which one is most likely to deliver on your organizational goals. We hold regular meetings with our technical leads and organizational leaders, where we collaboratively work through and challenge all aspects of the strategy. This “pressure testing” ensures that the strategies we commit to are not only viable but aligned with the broader organizational vision.

This article is based on the presentation Strategic Thinking for Staff+ Engineers that I gave at InfoQ Dev Summit Boston 2024.