Originally published on Medium on January 8, 2020.
One of the scenarios that drives me crazy as an owner of a complex and complicated tech stack is this: we want to be able to do thing X. Someone investigates thing X and decides (rightly!) that it’s not worth it for now but that it would be great to do someday. Then we completely drop that exploration and move onto the next thing.
What we should do is capture the core elements that are directional in an architectural north star for our stack. Then as we are making decisions in the relevant space, we can use whether or not it moves us in the direction of the north star as one of our guiding criteria. This should be a living document. It should be brief. It should talk about the high level capabilities we want to have, not how we would achieve them.
The piece that is missing when we drop explorations is the recognition that even if we’re not going somewhere right now, there is still value in knowing where we want to go. I believe that you can get a lot more value out of evolving systems than we currently do.
That said, I’m the manager. So if folks don’t know how to do this or that they should, it’s my fault ¯\_(ツ)_/¯