Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

Where do you want to be a year from now, and how can you get there?

As we enter 2026, it is a good time to evaluate and establish our engineering vision and strategy for the next year.

As managers or senior ICs, we are responsible for setting strategic goals and initiatives, but it is our teams that need to execute them. To do that effectively, they need to be bought in to the strategy: we want them to agree with our initiatives, and also proactively support and pursue them.

Building buy-in means ensuring there is a clear goal with realistic and meaningful outcomes. It requires ongoing communication efforts across different levels of the org. Building buy-in for strategic initiatives starts before the strategy is established, continuing through to the end – even going beyond into the next set of initiatives.

Build buy-in into the strategy itself

Initiatives that feel meaningful to the team will always be easier to promote than those that feel more disconnected or abstract. Meaningful strategies address problems or opportunities that the teams experience day-to-day, are realistic, and will believably have an impact on those opportunities.

Create a sense of ownership in the strategy

When engineers feel like they have had a say in creating the strategic initiatives, they will be predisposed to support the results. The collaboratively created initiatives will belong to the whole team – even those who didn’t see their ideas adopted will have had a say in the process.

Soliciting input from the org is a good place to start creating strategic initiatives. This can take several different forms, for example:

• Surveys asking for feedback on engineering practices, outcomes, and challenges. If you already have the beginnings of an idea forming, frame the questions in a way that will help you carve out the trajectory of the strategy. 
• “Lean coffee” sessions – meetings where the agenda is built on the fly by participants suggesting and then voting on different topics – with different groups to identify impactful focus areas. Here you can select starting topics to encourage thinking in a particular direction. 
• Gather information from teams about ongoing initiatives that may be worth scaling to the whole org. The teams whose work is promoted can form an early group of boosters for the strategy.
• Putting out a call for “one-pager” write-ups that identify an opportunity area. You can create examples and suggest types of opportunities to help steer the one-pagers toward areas you expect will be impactful..

These can be subtle or you can choose to make them overt, biasing contributions toward areas you believe will be important in 2026.

Another opportunity to create a sense of ownership is to ask different engineers or teams for feedback throughout the process of crafting strategic initiatives. Sharing early, vague ideas, or rough drafts and asking for feedback on the substance is the most effective. When team members feel that their feedback has had a meaningful impact, they feel more like collaborators on and co-owners of the strategy overall.

If you are not open to input on some aspect of the strategy, it is better to say so and direct that input elsewhere.

Build a meaningful strategy

Once your team has provided their input on the direction of a strategy, it’s time to weigh up the suggestions and start crafting the initiatives themselves. 

Whatever the form of the input, identifying themes and assessing impact potential across it will help prioritize issues. This analysis forms the basis of what Richard Rumelt, in Good Strategy / Bad Strategy, calls a diagnosis – a frank, blameless description of the current situation or challenge and its contributing factors. Different forms of input require different types of analysis:

• A survey can provide numeric data to identify the biggest opportunities: for each different aspect of the org, ask about satisfaction (from 1 – very unsatisfied to 5 – very satisfied) and importance (from 1 – very unimportant to 5 – very important). Multiply the satisfaction gap (i.e. 5 minus satisfaction score) by the importance to find out where people are the most frustrated.
• Lean coffee meetings produce a prioritized agenda. Compare the topics across different sessions to identify areas that are consistently top-of-mind for teams.
• One-pagers can be sorted into different themes or underlying problems.

It is critical that you honour input or feedback from engineers. Asking for input and ignoring it will make teams feel disconnected from your leadership.

Even if input and feedback don’t lead to a change in the substance of the strategic initiatives, or are out of scope for this year, you must still address them. Show the work of how inputs led to the eventual strategic initiatives and show why others didn’t. State how the plan will address areas that teams feel by sharing aggregated survey data, or even sharing a diagnosis document directly, if it is blameless and the culture supports candid analysis. You can share which topics or one-pagers contributed to prioritizing each initiative, and those that didn’t. 

Communicate the plan effectively

Once the strategy and initiatives are decided, effective communication is essential to building buy-in from the engineering org for the 2026 strategic plan. 

Start with why and aspirations

An effective starting point is the why behind the plan, and to describe an aspirational outcome at the end of 2026. Explain what each opportunity is, and how it will be different a year from now. For example:

• “Today, we spend hours deploying – and rolling back – every week. By the end of this year, we want deployments to be safe, frequent, and uneventful.”
• “We will take build times from over an hour to under one minute, so that you have feedback on changes right away.”
• “Our key applications are out of date and that slows us down. This year we will get up-to-date, and change how we approach dependencies to stay that way.”
• “We spend about 30% of our time on repetitive tasks that we could automate – ‘toil.’ In 2026, we will get this down to less than 10% by focusing on automation.”

Use positive, forward-looking language so that the initiatives will feel like achievements, and that the change to the status quo feels worth the disruptions.

Show the work

Whatever the process of building the strategic plan, showing the work will help teams – especially teams that weren’t involved in it initially – understand and trust that process, a critical step towards creating and sustaining a feeling of buy-in. Go beyond making documents available: walk people through the process and how the steps connect to each other, and encourage engineers to ask questions and dig deeper. Any artifacts you produce here can be re-shared throughout the year to build buy-in as new initiatives start. 

Things to include beyond the strategic plan itself include:

• Any strategy-building frameworks, like Good Strategy / Bad Strategy or Rich Hickey’s Design in Practice, both of which describe a loose process to arrive at an effective strategy, that informed the process.
• The analysis or diagnosis of the current challenges and opportunities facing the engineering org, and how that was created.
• Any policies or constraints on the strategy – for example, that engineering-specific initiatives cannot require more than 20% of the org’s capacity, or constraints, like change management, required by external frameworks, like SOC-2 compliance.

Take the time to explain how each project contributes to the strategy. Or ask teams – either permanent teams or temporary working groups – to come up with initiatives they can undertake that will move the needle. Creating a sense of choice and autonomy in how each team contributes to the overall strategy reinforces a feeling of ownership and maintains buy-in.

Repeat, repeat, repeat

Communicate the plan and progress on the strategy frequently. If the teams never hear about the strategy after January, then any buy-in they did feel will evaporate – and it will be harder to generate excitement and support for the 2027 plan. Putting in place some kind of structure for accountability demonstrates a commitment to following through on the plan.

An effective step is to assign owners to each strategic initiative, especially if some of those owners are ICs and line managers. Owners throughout the org will act as local champions, helping reiterate the plan, sharing the work they and others are doing on each initiative, and delegating to create even more owners.

Ask owners to share regular updates on progress with the whole org. Recurring all-hands meetings are a good venue for this. These updates keep the plan in the minds of the teams, add more voices supporting the plan, and give the owners opportunities to celebrate their teams’ own wins.

Validate the plan via early positive results. Encourage teams to share how the work has already impacted their day-to-day, and what tangible benefits they have experienced. Make a point to celebrate these results, especially outside of the engineering org. When progress against the engineering strategic plan is seen as laudable by the whole company, it reinforces the value of that work. Reinforcing the value will continually build the sense of pride and ownership that characterizes buy-in.

Don’t be afraid to pivot

No one can predict the future, and so planning for a year at a time is always going to be difficult. Include regular check-ins at least quarterly to reevaluate the plan and ensure that the ongoing initiatives are still the most impactful, and that the approach is working.

If there is a need to pivot, say so, and say why. Being transparent and taking accountability builds further trust and enforces the necessity of making a change. If projects are interrupted or taken off the plan, team members will likely be disappointed. Acknowledging that disappointment reiterates that the original plan was valuable and made in good faith.

Silently abandoning a strategic initiative – stopping communication about it without any kind of wrap-up – sends a message that the plan is not important, and that there is no value in the work. When an initiative completes, whether it succeeded or proved unfruitful, holding a retrospective and identifying positive outcomes, including things the team has learned through the attempt, sends the opposite message: that the initiative was worth trying and there is valuable work, even if the outcomes weren’t achieved.

Final thoughts 

Good strategy is hard, and building buy-in is a continuous effort. Getting people pointing in the same direction with strategic initiatives is not a technical problem: it requires interpersonal skills and emotional intelligence to manage the feelings and responses of many individuals. As engineering leaders, we can be most impactful by working to maintain that buy-in and support across our teams, while delegating most of the technical solutions. Focusing on providing clarity, helping teams identify and prioritize work that progresses the initiatives, and reinforcing the impact and results of that work is how we can act as force multipliers within our orgs.