1. Capability Mapping intermediate

    You have mapped capabilities and overlaid cost and differentiation. What decision does that enable?

    2 min answer capability-mapinvestmentbuild-vs-buydifferentiation
  2. Domain Boundaries advanced

    A B2B commerce and financing business is deciding where to draw the boundary between its commerce and credit domains. What should determine it?

    2 min answer ofbusinessdomainsboundariescredit
  3. Domain Boundaries advanced

    A marketplace is deciding whether "listing" and "inventory" are one domain or two. How should the boundary be decided, and what evidence settles it?

    2 min answer domain-boundariesbounded-contextlanguageownership
  4. Domain Boundaries advanced

    The word "customer" means different things in sales, fulfilment and finance. How does that affect your service design?

    2 min answer dddbounded-contextcanonical-modelubiquitous-language
  5. Domain Boundaries advanced

    Twilio announced the acquisition of Segment in October 2020 for about $3.2 billion in stock and closed it in November 2020, adding a customer-data platform alongside its messaging and voice APIs. Buying a product in an adjacent domain buys that domain's boundary along with its code. What does the acquirer gain, what does it pay, and when does that bill arrive?

    3 min answer twiliosegmentacquisitionbounded-context
  6. Domain Boundaries advanced

    Walk me through how you would choose the first capability to extract from a fifteen-year-old monolith, given that leadership expects visible progress within two quarters.

    3 min answer monolithextractionboundariessequencing
  7. Operating Models advanced

    A 900-person engineering organisation funds work as 9-month projects. A project receives a budget and a team drawn from a resourcing pool; both dissolve at go-live. Run costs land on a central operations group of 30 people who support about 140 services. The CTO wants durable product teams that own their services in production. Sequence this change over four quarters without stopping delivery.

    3 min answer operating-modelfunding-modelownershipyou-build-it-you-run-it
  8. Operating Models advanced

    A logistics marketplace expanding city by city must decide what is centralised and what is local. How should that be structured?

    2 min answer porterexpansioncentralisationconfiguration
  9. Operating Models advanced

    A super-app spans messaging, payments, mini-programs and social features. What operating model supports it, and what does the architecture require in return?

    2 min answer operating-modelautonomyplatformgovernance
  10. Operating Models advanced

    An organisation centralises all schema changes through one data team of four, serving fourteen product teams. The arrangement is defended as efficient. What is gained, what is paid, and when does the bill arrive?

    2 min answer centralisationqueueinglead timebottleneck
  11. Operating Models advanced

    An organisation with functional teams — development, QA, operations, database — wants to adopt microservices. What do you tell them?

    2 min answer conways-lawoperating-modeldistributed-monolithteams
  12. Organisational Constraints advanced

    An architect proposes a design requiring three teams to coordinate on every release. The organisation will not restructure. What are the options?

    2 min answer organisational-constraintsconways-lawboundariescoordination