Business Architecture
General material on the business side of architecture.
2 to work through
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intermediate
A startup asks you to architect their product "to handle millions of users". They currently have none. What do you actually build?
2 min answer -
advanced
Southwest cancelled about 16,700 flights in December 2022 when crew scheduling could not recover from a storm, after years of deferred modernisation. How do you make that argument before the failure rather than after?
3 min answer
9 terms in this topic
Booking.com's Experimentation Platform
Booking.com runs over a thousand concurrent experiments and treats the ability to test any change safely as a platform capability rather than a produ…
conceptBusiness Capability
What a business does, expressed stably and independently of how it currently does it or who is responsible.
practiceProduct Thinking
Treating what you build as something with users, a value proposition and a lifecycle, rather than as a project that completes.
conceptRegulatory Constraint
A legal requirement that removes design options — and one that must be established early, because it is not negotiable and is expensive to retrofit.
case-studySpotify's Squad Model and Its Retrospective
The widely-copied Spotify model of squads, tribes, chapters and guilds was a snapshot that did not work as documented even at Spotify — a caution abo…
practiceStakeholder Analysis
Identifying who is affected by an architecture, what each of them needs from it, and how much influence they have over whether it proceeds.
metricTime to Market
How long it takes to get a capability in front of customers — often the constraint that dominates every other architectural quality.
conceptTwo-Pizza Team
Amazon's heuristic that a team should be small enough to be fed by two pizzas, and — the substantive part — should own its service end to end.
conceptValue Stream
The end-to-end sequence of activities that delivers a result to a customer, viewed across whatever departments and systems it happens to cross.
Neighbouring topics
Business Capabilities
What a business does, stated stably and independent of implementation.
No content yetCapability Mapping
Overlaying systems onto capabilities to expose duplication and gaps.
No content yetBusiness Processes
How work actually flows, including the handoffs nobody documented.
No content yetValue Streams
End-to-end delivery of an outcome, and where the waiting happens.
No content yetDomain Boundaries
Where the language of the business changes, and services should too.
No content yetStakeholder Analysis
Who is affected, what they need, and who can block you late.
No content yetProduct Thinking
Treating platforms and services as products with users and a lifecycle.
No content yetBusiness KPIs
The numbers a design is ultimately judged against.
No content yetRegulatory Constraints
Non-negotiable requirements that remove design options entirely.
No content yetOrganisational Constraints
Team structure, skills and budget cycles as architectural inputs.
No content yetTime to Market
The constraint that dominates most products, and how to trade against it.
No content yetBuild vs Buy
Differentiation versus table stakes, priced over five years.
No content yetBusiness Cases
Expressing an architecture proposal in the currency that gets funded.
No content yetOperating Models
How delivery, platform and governance functions fit together.
No content yetTeam Topologies
Stream-aligned, platform, enabling and complicated-subsystem teams.
No content yetPlatform as a Product
Adoption earned rather than mandated, with an owner and a roadmap.
No content yetOutcome Measurement
Knowing whether the thing you built achieved what it promised.
No content yetPortfolio Prioritisation
Choosing between investments with incomparable benefits.
No content yetBusiness Continuity
What the business does while the system is unavailable.
No content yet