One common mistake technical leaders make

In his 1996 paper Michael Porter stated that Operational Efficiency is not strategy - because competitors can simply catch up by being just as efficient, and you no longer have any kind of advantage.

When I speak to technical leaders and ask them what their strategy is, they start by explaining all the systems they have that are not quite up to scratch and give a detailed list as to how they would go about fixing them. This list is usually very thought out and sensible, but it is not a strategy - it is a list of how to be operationally excellent. This falls into the same trap as operational efficiency - your competitors can simply catchup.

In the book Competitive Strategy, 2 general strategies are outlined:

• Cost (your customers know you are the cheapest)
• Differentiation (your customers know how you are different)

If you were the lowest cost in an industry the technical strategy for achieving that would be very different from if you were differentiated based on a feature set.

To answer my earlier question, when asking a technical leader what the strategy is, the answer is to start by stating the company strategy, then saying this is how we are going to enable that in our department. It matters much more that your department is aligned to ensure the company strategy succeeds, than selecting the right database for example. Customers don’t know (or care) what your technical choices are, they care about getting value from your products.