Technical Strategy Template

Technical Vision

Where is the technology going? Describe the target state in 2-3 years — not a wishlist of tools, but a picture of how the system works, how the team operates, and what capabilities we have that we don't have today. A new engineer should read this and understand the direction.

Answer: If everything goes well, what does our technical world look like at the end of this horizon? How is it different from today? What can we do that we can't do now?

Where We Are Today

Honest assessment of the current state. Strengths, weaknesses, and the forces that shaped how we got here. Skip the spin — this section is for the team, not investors.

What's Working

• Technical strength we should preserve and build on

• Practice, tool, or architecture decision that has paid off

• Area where the team operates well

What's Not Working

• Pain point that slows the team down or causes incidents

• Architecture decision that made sense at the time but no longer scales

• Area where we lack capability, tooling, or expertise

Key Metrics

Strategic Priorities

The 3-5 technical themes you are investing in this cycle. Each priority should be a clear bet: we are spending engineering time on this because we believe it will make the team faster, the system more reliable, or the product more capable.

Priority 1: [Name]

Priority 2: [Name]

Priority 3: [Name]

Technology Radar

Where does the team stand on specific technologies? This prevents individual teams from making incompatible choices and makes adoption decisions explicit.

This is not a ban list. "Hold" means we're not investing more, not that existing usage is wrong. "Retire" means we have a plan and a timeline to move off it.

Technical Debt

Be specific about what debt exists, what it costs, and what you are choosing to pay down vs. live with. Vague statements like "we have tech debt" help no one.

Platform & Infrastructure Direction

Where is the platform heading? This covers the shared foundation that all product teams build on.

• Deployment and CI/CD: Current state and where you're headed (faster builds, better deploys, infra-as-code)

• Observability: Gaps in monitoring, logging, or tracing and the plan to close them

• Developer experience: What makes engineers slow or frustrated, and what you're doing about it (local dev, test speed, docs)

• Scalability: Known ceilings and the plan to raise them before they become incidents

• Security posture: Where you're strong, where you're exposed, and the hardening plan

Investment Allocation

How engineering capacity is distributed. Making this visible prevents the trap where product work consumes 100% and everything else degrades silently.

Hiring & Team Shape

Does the team have the right people and skills for the strategy? Where are the gaps?

Key-person risks (areas where one person holds critical knowledge):

• Area — person — knowledge transfer plan

What We Are NOT Doing

The technical initiatives you considered and deliberately chose not to pursue. This prevents teams from going rogue on "wouldn't it be cool if" projects and gives leadership confidence that the priorities are real choices.

Risks

How We Track Progress

References

• Product Strategy doc — the business direction this tech strategy supports

• Solution Architecture docs for major systems

• ADR index — the decision history

• Previous Technical Strategy (if this is an update)