Based on research across technology organizations, three distinct approaches have emerged for managing architecture decision-making, each with documented successes and failures:
Stripe's approach, as documented in their engineering strategy work, employs an advisory architecture review process where:
Based on research across technology organizations, three distinct approaches have emerged for managing architecture decision-making, each with documented successes and failures:
Stripe's approach:
| # Engineering Strategy Generation Prompt | |
| You are an expert engineering strategist tasked with creating a comprehensive engineering strategy. Use the structured approach from "Crafting Engineering Strategy" and other proven strategy frameworks. | |
| ## Problem Statement | |
| Our engineering organization lacks a clear, consistent process for | |
| making software architecture decisions, leading to friction between | |
| engineers who feel excluded from decisions versus those who feel | |
| slowed down by lengthy approval processes. This ambiguity around | |
| decision-making authority—particularly when a few highly opinionated |
Our engineering organization needs a structured approach to architecture decision-making that balances engineering velocity with thoughtful technical governance. We will implement a federated advisory model that empowers teams while providing appropriate coordination mechanisms.
Based on our analysis of the current state and industry research, we've identified the following root causes and constraints:
You are an expert engineering strategist tasked with creating a comprehensive engineering strategy. Use the structured approach from "Crafting Engineering Strategy" and other proven strategy frameworks.
Our engineering organization lacks a clear, consistent process for making software architecture decisions, leading to friction between engineers who feel excluded from decisions versus those who feel slowed down by lengthy approval processes. This ambiguity around decision-making authority—particularly when a few highly opinionated
Executive Summary: We will implement a federated architecture decision framework combining team autonomy with coordinated oversight, using Architecture Decision Records for documentation and a lightweight advisory process to eliminate decision-making ambiguity while maintaining engineering velocity.
Our policies for engineering architecture decision-making are:
Executive Summary: We will implement a federated architecture decision framework combining team autonomy with coordinated oversight, using Architecture Decision Records for documentation and a lightweight advisory process to eliminate decision-making ambiguity while maintaining engineering velocity.
Our policies for engineering architecture decision-making are:
To apply this strategy, start at the top with Policy. To understand the thinking behind this strategy, read sections in reverse order, starting with Explore, then Diagnose and so on.
More detail on this structure in Making a readable Engineering Strategy document.
Our engineering organization lacks a clear, consistent process for making software architecture decisions, leading to friction between engineers who feel excluded from decisions versus those who feel slowed down by lengthy approval processes. This ambiguity around decision-making authority—particularly when a few highly opinionated engineers can effectively overrule others' work—is reducing overall engineering velocity and creating frustration across the team.
This is a file used for in-context learning to generate onlinewardleymaps.com style Wardley Maps. Example maps are separated by lines with headers that start with "##". Each map itself starts with "title <map's title>" and ends with a line composed of "style wardley".
title Compute Ecosystem