Do you know the difference between strategy and tactics?
Took me 10 years of attending management classes, reading books, and working at various companies to explain the difference. If you can summarize how strategy isn’t the same as tactics – would love to hear from you. If not, I hope after you read this you won’t need a decade so here we go:
In classic RPGs (role-playing games) you’ve got the character classes warrior, thief, cleric, and mage.
If you’ve never played that genre of games, warriors swing a sword at monsters. Thieves sneak around and stab from the shadows. Clerics heal the team (red bars go up.) Mages spam fireballs. A typical game allows you to choose your party combination for a total of 4 characters on one team.
Building the correct adventuring team is an important part of your team strategy.
Strategy is looking forward – do you have the correct combination of classes? You can’t plan for every edge case. If you don’t bring a thief, you can’t pick the lock to a secret door or defuse a trap. You would have a difficult time in a dungeon run by a paranoid treasure hoarder stacked with boulder and spiked traps.
A balanced strategy is to bring the different classes warrior, thief, cleric, and mage. Your party won’t have glaring weaknesses so you should survive most situations. Your team also doesn’t excel at anything so you might not overwhelm any situation and be forced to spend more time.
If you know the dungeon is filled with ice creatures managed by the queen of frost Elsa – a great strategy is to stack your team with all fire mages and go to town. You’ll melt every frost monster with a severe weakness to fire you meet. Your adventure should be fairly smooth because you picked a good strategy.
Tactics is when you’re in the moment shifting the warrior to back of the party when they’ve taken too much damage and the cleric needs time for healing to work.
Back to engineering management.
For team strategy, I’m always assessing my team if we have the correct skills for future projects. If we don’t, then I need to figure out how I can retrain the team. Junior engineers someday can level up into senior engineers. They could multi-class to data scientist or an iOS developer. Full-stack engineers would be the “generic adventurer.” They can be whatever they want. But they might not have legendary skills in a specific area. I work with each engineer closely and I will spend over 4 hours per person on 1:1s if required.
For tactics, I would check how well the team can write code, debug and test. If an engineer is worn-out from a previous issue, I’ll have them rest and swap in another engineer to cover. I am constantly watching Redmine for incoming bugs and triaging with the engineers. If we see a p0 issue, I work with the team to figure out who can interrupt and field on the issue. Other times we can delay or not doing anything about the bug. Our team maintains course through the various projects.
And that’s the difference between strategy and tactics.
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