Three Levels of War: The Framework That Breaks Everything

The Dysfunction

Your CTO is drowning in Slack. Forty-seven messages a day. In every standup. Reviewing pull requests at 10 PM. Architecting systems. Making hiring decisions. Unblocking teams.

But your revenue is stable. Product is shipping. The team isn't in crisis.

So why is the person supposed to be steering the ship spending all their time bailing water?

Because nobody—not even the CTO—knows the difference between Strategic, Operational, and Tactical work.

This is the pattern I see in every broken engineering org. And once you see it, you can't unsee it.

The Three Levels

All work in an engineering organization serves a single purpose: moving toward the North Star.

If there's no North Star, everything that follows is just expensive confusion. But assuming you have one, all the work that happens—from daily decisions to quarterly planning—fits into three distinct levels. They're not hierarchical. They're sequential. Strategy flows to Operational, which enables Tactical.

Strategic Work: "What needs to be true in 18 months?"

Strategic work answers the fundamental question: Where are we going and what needs to happen to get there?

This is not "we're building a mobile app." This is "we need to own the X market by owning reliability in Y domain, which means we need to be 10x faster than competitors at Z, and that requires rethinking our architecture at the database layer."

Who does this: CEO and CTO (with input from senior architects).

Time horizon: 12-18 months forward.

Output: A direction that's clear enough that teams can make local decisions that still point in the same direction. A technical direction that's ambitious but achievable. Clarity on what not to do.

The sign it's broken: Nobody knows why we're building the next thing. Every decision feels equally important. Nothing gets deprioritized because the North Star is fuzzy.

Operational Work: "How do we build the system that executes the strategy?"

Operational work builds the structure that lets strategy actually happen without the leader being in every decision.

This is hiring the right people for the next phase. Building consistent code review standards. Creating a release process that scales to 20 engineers without everything breaking. Establishing how teams communicate. Creating an onboarding process so new people don't take 4 months to ship.

Operational work is invisible until it's missing. Then everything becomes chaos.

Who does this: VP Engineering, Tech Leads, Staff Engineers.

Time horizon: 3-6 months forward (this quarter's hiring enables next quarter's strategy).

Output: Systems and structures that let teams execute without constant escalation to leadership.

The sign it's broken: Every decision requires the senior person's judgment. New hires take months to become productive. Code review takes forever because there's no standard. You can't scale without adding senior people.

Tactical Work: "What ships this week?"

Tactical work is the actual execution. Code. Bugs. Features. Sprint planning. The daily work of moving work from "to do" to "done."

This is where the energy of the organization lives. This is where real delivery happens. And it's important.

Who does this: Engineers, Tech Leads (40% of their time), with autonomy.

Time horizon: Days to weeks.

Output: Working software.

The sign it's broken: Things ship slowly. Estimates are always wrong. The team is constantly surprises by rework.

Why This Matters

Most organizations are broken at one of two levels:

Broken at Strategic: No clear North Star means everything feels urgent. The CTO ends up evaluating every decision because there's no framework for "this matters" vs. "this doesn't." Chaos disguises itself as intensity.

Broken at Operational: Strategy exists but there's no system to execute it. So leadership stays in the weeds trying to impose structure through personal presence. Scale becomes impossible. Teams stay dependent.

When both are working? Tactical hums along. Teams move fast. The CTO isn't in Slack 47 times a day.

What's Next

In the next piece, we'll map where each role should actually be spending their time—and why most organizations are way out of balance.

For now: where is your organization breaking?