The first time I heard about Wardley Mapping was from Charity Majors discussing it on Twitter. Of the three core strategy refinement techniques, this is the technique that I’ve personally used the least. Despite that, I decided to include it in this book because it highlights how many different techniques can be used for refining strategy, and also because it’s particularly effective at looking at the broadest ecosystems your organization exists in.| lethain.com
While I was probably late to learn the concept of strategy testing, I might have learned about systems modeling too early in my career, stumbling on Donella Meadows’ Thinking in Systems: A Primer before I began my career in software. Over the years, I’ve discovered a number of ways to miuse systems modeling, but it remains the most effective, flexible tool I’ve found to debugging complex problems. In this chapter, we’ll work through:| lethain.com
From their first introduction in 2005, the debate between adopting a microservices architecture, a monolithic service architecture, or a hybrid between the two, has become one of the least-reversible decisions that most engineering organizations make. Even migrating to a different database technology is generally a less expensive change than moving from monolith to microservices or from microservices to monolith. The industry has in many ways gone full circle on that debate, from most hypersc...| lethain.com
This is a work-in-progress draft! Often you’ll see a disorganized collection of ideas labeled as a “strategy.” Even when they’re dense with ideas, these can be hard to parse, and are a major reason why most engineers will claim their company doesn’t have a clear strategy even though all companies follow some strategy, even if it’s undocumented. This chapter lays out a repeatable, structured approach to creating strategy. In it, we’ll cover:| lethain.com
As discussed in Components of engineering strategy, a complete engineering strategy has five components: explore, diagnose, refine (map & model), policy, and operation. However, it’s actually quite challenging to read a strategy document written that way. That’s an effective sequence for creating a strategy, but it’s a challenging sequence for those trying to quickly read and apply a strategy without necessarily wanting to understand the complete thinking behind each decision. This post...| lethain.com