Domain Boundaries
Where the language of the business changes, and services should too.
5 to work through
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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 -
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 -
advanced
The word "customer" means different things in sales, fulfilment and finance. How does that affect your service design?
2 min answer -
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 -
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
2 terms in this topic
Business Domain Boundary
A division of the business into areas with distinct language, ownership and rates of change, used as the primary input to system and team boundaries.
practiceDomain Boundaries from the Business
Deriving service boundaries from the language and decisions of the business, rather than from data structure or team structure.
Neighbouring topics
Business Architecture
General material on the business side of architecture.
Business Capabilities
What a business does, stated stably and independent of implementation.
Capability Mapping
Overlaying systems onto capabilities to expose duplication and gaps.
Business Processes
How work actually flows, including the handoffs nobody documented.
Value Streams
End-to-end delivery of an outcome, and where the waiting happens.
Stakeholder Analysis
Who is affected, what they need, and who can block you late.
Product Thinking
Treating platforms and services as products with users and a lifecycle.
Business KPIs
The numbers a design is ultimately judged against.
Regulatory Constraints
Non-negotiable requirements that remove design options entirely.
Organisational Constraints
Team structure, skills and budget cycles as architectural inputs.
Time to Market
The constraint that dominates most products, and how to trade against it.
Build vs Buy
Differentiation versus table stakes, priced over five years.
Business Cases
Expressing an architecture proposal in the currency that gets funded.
Operating Models
How delivery, platform and governance functions fit together.
Team Topologies
Stream-aligned, platform, enabling and complicated-subsystem teams.
Platform as a Product
Adoption earned rather than mandated, with an owner and a roadmap.
Outcome Measurement
Knowing whether the thing you built achieved what it promised.
Portfolio Prioritisation
Choosing between investments with incomparable benefits.
Business Continuity
What the business does while the system is unavailable.