What Does It Mean to Be Strategic?

The practice of connecting intentions to outcomes

 
What does it mean to be strategic? Through my experience of leading engineering organizations at Google, both as a tech lead and manager, the word “strategy” and the need to “be strategic” came up a lot across technical, product, and organizational contexts. Yet clearly defining what either might mean and consistently delivering on both has been challenging.

As I understand it now, being strategic is a sort of practice, a thinking hygiene. Simply put, being strategic means that the outcomes produced by our actions are not at odds with our intentions.

A well-known thinker in this area, Richard Rumelt, has done a lot of heavy lifting to unpack what good strategy entails. Building on his work, I’ll connect intentions and outcomes into a five-step cycle:

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