Technology
Architecture, platform, and technical judgment.
Which technical decisions deserve your attention, which ones you should refuse to make yet, and how to keep the system cheap to change.
Architecture decisions that age well
Write down the decision, the alternatives you rejected, and the conditions that would make you revisit it. Future you is a stranger with no context.
5-20 · 20-50 · 50-150 · 150+
Build, buy, or borrow
There's no default rule worth having here. Three tests decide it: is this what customers pay us for, who carries it at 3am, and what does it cost to get out.
0-5 · 5-20 · 20-50 · 50-150 · 150+
Tech debt as a balance sheet, not a feeling
Debt is the gap between the system you have and the one your roadmap needs. Price it against specific upcoming work and pay it inside that work, never in a scheduled debt sprint.
5-20 · 20-50 · 50-150 · 150+
Developer experience as a product
Setup time, build time, review latency, and deploy time are the compound-interest numbers of an engineering org. Everyone pays them, every day, and nobody bills for them.
20-50 · 50-150 · 150+
The data model is destiny
You can refactor code in an afternoon. A wrong core entity outlives three rewrites and quietly decides what your product is allowed to become.
0-5 · 5-20 · 20-50 · 50-150 · 150+
Boring technology, deliberately chosen
You get a small number of innovation tokens. Spend them where your product is actually differentiated and buy the rest off the shelf.
0-5 · 5-20 · 20-50 · 50-150 · 150+
Cloud cost is an engineering metric now
Unit cost belongs on the same dashboard as latency and uptime, watched by the people who can actually move it. Engineering owns the number, finance partners on it.
20-50 · 50-150 · 150+