Strategy

One of the course that I'm taking here at UTM (University of Toronto Mississauga) is the IMI303 Technology Strategy course. I kind of breezed through the syllabus (I didn't actually understand concretely what the course is going to try to teach me other than some vague ideas), but I thought the topic that it's going to touch seems interesting. I am definitely grateful that I chose this course and got approved to take it during my stay here.

The course is centered primarily around this idea of strategy. One of the first reading that I had to read is this HBR (Harvard Business Review) article from way back in 1996 titled "What Is Strategy?". It's a great article that really opened my eyes toward this concept of strategy. I'm not going to try to poorly reiterate what the article defines as strategy and the nuances around it so I recommend just giving it a read. I'm more interested in talking about how this revelation changes my worldview as well as how I relate to it on how I do things in my life thus far.

First is the concept of positioning. Positioning explains why is it that some companies offer radically different products and/or services than its rivals, even if doing so often times results in them being perceived as "inferior" by consumers, because they simply positioned themselves differently than its seemingly superior rivals. Companies provide inherently different products and services, as well as provide them with sometimes inherently different methods because they want to sustain a competitive advantage that cannot be easily copied by its rivals without copying everything that they do.

Positioning explains why in a given market, it's hard to find examples of companies providing products and/or services that are an exact carbon copy of one another, because the participants in that market simply has different positions. Why do they have different positions? Because they want to have competitive advantage over each other that they can sustain.

In addition to positioning, there's also another component to strategy: fit. It's essentially the degree to which activities conducted by a company compliments and reinforces each other. The (again, really great) article spelled out the types and examples of fit so I'm not going to repeat that here again.

After reading up on positioning and fit, I realized now that what I've been doing all this time is, to some degree, exercising both of them to my own advantage in my own professional life. Early on at the start of university, instead of doubling down on my technical capability as an informatics student (which is important and I'm not discounting that) I deliberately chose to allocate my time and resources to other things and other skills. There's no better example of this than the fact that I decided to participate in Model United Nations (MUNs). I didn't just compete, I also joined the organizations related to them, such as the MUN Club in my university and the organizers for some of the most prestigious MUNs in Indonesia.

And the reasoning why I did that is because it's a unique position. Getting into MUNs enriched skills and qualities that I'm certain most people in my major doesn't get to exercise. Skills such as the ability to do research, to speak publicly in English with ease, to hold one's own in an argumentation, to be persuasive, etc.. Qualities such as being confident, being able to speak (not just to read and write) English fluently, etc.. It also grants me relatively unique opportunities, e.g. working and networking with people from non-STEM majors such as International Relations or Law. I mentioned that opportunity specifically because my university, in particular, is an institute of technology, its majors almost wholly consists of STEM majors. In such an environment, you wouldn't really get to meet and befriend people from non-STEM majors unless you get out of your way to do it, as I have. And in my opinion, it's pretty important to interact with people from non-STEM majors because in the real world, they're the one running the world.

My position, as described above, does require a necessary trade-off (something that is highlighted by the article as necessary in positioning). The time and effort that I need to spend doing MUNs does take away from the time and effort that I utilize to improve and train upon my hard skills as an informatics engineering student. Choosing the above position also comes with choosing deliberately to not be the best of the best in the core skills necessary to be a developer or engineer. My defense of this position solely comes from it being unique. There are plenty of really skilled and masterful developers and engineers out there that you can find, and my university certainly does not have a shortage of them. But can you find people in such profession that adopt the position that I have? My guess is not really. Now, whether or not the job market actually seek or value this sort of position from their employee is a whole other question, but it's a unique position that I believe has many great qualities (as I have explained above). This particular position also cannot be easily copied by others due to the high time and efforts necessary to commit to the hobby.

Another simpler example is my attempt to get into hackathons here in Canada to compete and possibly win them. Even just by becoming a participant in foreign hackathons, I would already be positioning myself differently (and uniquely!) among my peers since many of them have never done that. The relatively far away location of Canada, further drive a wedge between me and my competitors' position that they cannot easily overcome.

The previous two examples mostly highlight positioning, but here's the last example that I would give that highlights fit. I interned for an AI-based software company called Covena from June to August, right before I departed to Canada. That internship coincided with the time that I allocated to do hackathons here in Indonesia to prepare for the position that I just mentioned in the previous paragraph (see reasoning here). What I want to highlight is how I managed to make both activities, doing the internship and doing hackathons, reinforces each other i.e. the second-order fit that the article mentioned.

There are two tech stacks that are ubiquitously used in Covena: Langchain and Langgraph (arguably one is a part of the other but you get the idea). On my first hackathon, I was yet to be proficient with Langgraph, but I had a half-decent ability to cobble something up in Langchain (it's not a prohibitively difficult library to learn, it certainly has a low skill floor). On my second hackathon, I had more experience and proficiency dealing with Langgraph. I used my experience working with Langgraph during my internship to pick the best system design for the LLM flow, the preferable UI/UX design for the applications, etc.. Thus, my activity of doing the internship with the two above tech stacks made it easier for me to deliver and excel in the hackathons that I got into. But the reinforcement doesn't just go in one way. After the second hackathon, I showed off my project to the company (it's a small start-up of six people including me at the time). The higher-ups at the company liked the idea and showed it to a potential client that was looking for a similar solution. I couldn't say what happened after that but I can say that I believe the potential client also liked what I made. Thus my hackathon activity assisted my internship activity by because my achievement in the former manages to impress my boss and help the company in the latter. This is what I believe as the second-order fit that the article talked about (perhaps it's also a third-order fit since it is an optimization of effort).

That's why this concept of strategy is so captivating to me, because I have (unknowingly) been doing it for as long as I can remember and also because it enables me to achieve more with less effort (the thing that engineering student always seek to achieve). For the many compelling reasons given in the article, I think implementing this concept not just in running a company but also in my professional life is as I have done so above, is immensely beneficial and productive in cultivating my worth.