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The Argument: Better Architecture Everyday

Domain Driven Design and Architecture

November 10, 2021 • Iasa Global

I had a great time discussing Domain Driven Design and Architecture in Agile. We found a huge amount of commonality with solution principles and business value while diving deeper on bounding contexts, capabilities and strategy. Nick is an amazing writer, speaker and author and writes regularly on medium at https://medium.com/nick-tune-tech-strategy-blog.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
Feeling good already.

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Paul Preiss
Welcome to the argument the Iasa podcast, where we bring top industry leaders and writers and thinkers to the show to debate to discuss, sometimes even to argue. Today we have a fantastic thinker, Neptune. I'm a big fan of his blog and I think you should be as well as well as some of his speaking and training.

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Paul Preiss
He is a writer and and thinker on architecture and domain driven design. Agile context at scale and technology as strategy. So welcome Nick.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
Hey Paul, thank you. Thanks for the intro fan of your work T.

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Paul Preiss
Well, so why don't you tell us a little bit? You know I did a little intro but tell us a little bit about where you're at right now. What you're working on you know what, what's your focus area?

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Nick Tune (Guest)
OK, sure, definitely.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
So I guess.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
I guess maybe going back to the start of the pandemic is probably the best place to set some context for the work I'm doing now. I think because of the pandemic.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
Suddenly?

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Nick Tune (Guest)
Ah.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
Certainly my the the companies I work with became much more global because now we're all working remotely suddenly.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
The the needs to be together physically disappeared, so I I I probably in the last 18 months since the since the lockdown started happening.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
I started getting more. Yeah, more variation. Like companies in the US, even on the West Coast, the company in the West Coast currently working with the company in Canada so.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
Uhm, that's also seen some variation in the kind of work I'm doing, so I guess the the main thing that people know me for, and the main kind of work I I do is things like event storming to help companies map out business processes.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
Uh, and then storming technique where?

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Nick Tune (Guest)
It's I would say it's a lofi technique for mapping business processes in a format which is accessible to anyone so you can get your developers your domain experts, your product, people, sales people, marketing anyone really all mapping out bits of the process that they understand using Post-its.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
And then from there people.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
And people probably contact me most often because they want to know. How do we architects our organization into into pieces, you know, microservices, domains, subdomains, business capabilities.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
They're all kind of similar, similar thing, right? How can we break our business up and our software into pieces and organize our teams around that?

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Nick Tune (Guest)
So that's the kind of work I was.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
Doing for the last few years as a consultant with some companies it can be a like two to four workshops and that's it. And with some companies I'm more embedded in the company.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
And.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
Perhaps taking on a role so I I worked with a company in the UK from October last.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
October yeah, October last year until June this year and I was helping him to set up a new cloud platform and moving to the cloud. And I was the head of API platform or the interim helping them set it up. So I do a mix of short and long term or more engaged relationships.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
But since since the pandemic started.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
Uhm?

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Nick Tune (Guest)
I've been doing.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
I've been in, let's say, a bit more ad hoc workshops like people have a people have a specific problem and I realize.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
Event storming and those other DD things I were doing before probably isn't quite the right fit here. Before I used to see everything through that domains, human design mindset and everything was like let's do event storming or some domains with design stuff.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
But now I've been looking into more bespoke kind of workshops. At the moment I'm working with a company in Canada for about 50% of my time, and I work with.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
With a man.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
Someone who's a change expert. He's got a sports psychology degree and someone who's got a tech background. He does liberating structures and we're basically just helping leadership and teams to solve specific problems by designing bespoke workshops. So yeah, over the last.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
6 to 12 months. Yeah I've, I've just got more into that, but spoke workshop space thinking what what's the problem? This group of people have.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
And how do we help them make progress in some way? And you know, that's on a a measurable outcomes, but also.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
How how the group works together? So how can we empower this group to figure out how to solve their problems themselves? So how can we we use things like and? It's not super advanced stuff, it's things like.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
Working with a group to define a press release. So OK, you all a bit stuck in the current day today and what you're going to do tomorrow and you've got these priorities. But what's the longer term vision? So in the situation like that?

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Nick Tune (Guest)
And will have an activity to correct press release where everyone shares their thoughts.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
And then based on everyones responses will have a kind of a Northstar we work towards and the group get some clarity and so yeah to to summarize.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
Traditionally I've been mostly domains. You would design and architecture in the past year or so. I still doing that, but now a bit more ad hoc workshops and group facilitation even though it's not my my main strength, I'm really trying to work on that and I find it's super enjoyable. It's like.

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Paul Preiss
Right?

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Nick Tune (Guest)
I don't know. I don't know for the people listening how, how often they do workshops, but.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
When when you think about you've got 60 or 90 minutes with a group of people like what's the? How can we use that most effectively? They were just unlimited things you could do in that time, and it's quite a limited amount of time, so I'm just thinking about the best techniques and how to use that.

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Paul Preiss
Yep.

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Paul Preiss
Yeah.

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Paul Preiss
Well, you know I so one of the things that attracted me to bringing on this at this interview. Two was you had done a domain driven design.

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Paul Preiss
They basically a canvas you know and I don't know if you know, but in the middle box we've we've really focused in on what we call the structured canvas approach, which is basically it's based on that right facilitation tool that links then concepts or that you can do in a room with sticky notes with the right group of stakeholders at 60 to 90 minutes and stay laser focused on the problem and and even faster if if you know if that is necessary. But that also linked together.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
Yeah.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
Yeah.

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Paul Preiss
To allow the architect too.

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Paul Preiss
You know to build out a set of a set of related concepts which didn't linked to others, etc. So it's it. It's about tracking the kind of mind of technology strategists and those kinds of things. So that was that was one of the original things that I was like, oh, this is awesome.

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Paul Preiss
But the the the, the other thing that you talked a lot about is these these. You know the sort of context related pieces, and that's obviously a really big deal to architects because so much of our work is, you know, the answer to any question is it depends right? It and depends on blow, who's your stakeholders and who's your customer and where you have your business and what do you do? You know what kind of technology landscapes do you have?

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Paul Preiss
And you know those kinds of those kinds of questions, so I guess you know we always. It's almost tradition now to start out with with just kind of a simple question which is is is not that simple at all. And that is where are you at in architecture today? Where? Where's your head at in terms of what you know? What architects are? What we face? What are challenges are?

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Paul Preiss
Uhm?

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Paul Preiss
You know, just give us a kind of you're kind of short, lay of the land, you know.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
Yeah, so I think that if we look at the trends over the last.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
Probably starting at the start of the last decade in how companies work, there's been a move towards decentralization.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
I think we've we're moving more and more away from command and control and and thinking up front with projects to empower. Teams are empowered to get closer to the customers and empowered to own their technology and have loosely coupled microservices and things. So I think.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
I think we have to work around those constraints when we think about what is an architect rather than trying to.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
Rather than trying to say what's in architects and making an organization fit around that, that's just not going to work. So we look at the constraints of current organizations and current technology trends. I think. Well, how? How could and architecture fits in around the way companies operates at the moment in in modern operating models and for me I I still think that.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
There is value in the role of an architect I when I was with the company.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
At the start of the year.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
I think we had a lot of these conversations and there were some things that I pointed out.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
Which I think very clearly or very.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
Nicely fit into the role of an architect, so I think with decentralization.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
One of the one of the problems, or the consequences of that is.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
The potential to have more silos and less joining the dots across different teams. And I've seen that.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
Uh, one company I worked with one of the tech lead spoke to me and he said.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
Finds it very frustrating to work with the other team.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
Come on.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
And he said, because every team has autonomy to do exactly what they want to this other teams gone their own way and certain technologies, and you know that that this guy was speaking too. He, he added, has a dependency on that team. But they wanted to work on something else. And because everyone has autonomy to do exactly what they want to do, that means he was a man.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
He was a bit frustrated with that, so I think I think with that with those constraints and that problem in mind, where could an architect fit in in to to add value in that situation? I think looking at things happening across different teams is definitely 1 area.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
So event storming one of the techniques from demanding with design I talked about that's actually a tool for mapping out business processes which span across multiple teams.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
Depending on the size of your company you you might map out a business process which can touch 20 or 30 teams in an event storming session. I mean, you could go super high level, then map out an entire company, but let's say a company like Amazon or Google. He could have mapped out the whole company in an event storming session. It's just too huge.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
But I think there's there's value in an architect looking at different teams looking at their backlogs, what they're working on and and saying there's a need here for people to see the bigger picture. So as an architect, I'm going to run an event storming session, bring these teams together to map out the whole flow across all of those teams.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
It doesn't have.

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Paul Preiss
So I wanna I wanna I wanna interrupt you there for a second because there was a there was a number of imply I'm I'm a very big fan of rigorous, you know exposure of implied meaning because so much of our world is about using the same words to mean different things and using different words to mean the same things. And a whole blend of in between.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
Yeah.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
Yeah.

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Paul Preiss
Now what I'd up there especially is a few things. One was the role you could say the role of architect, which kind of assumes that it's a kind of mantle that you can take on, that there is a a set of tasks more than it's a type of person, or a set of hard earned competencies.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
Uh-huh

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Paul Preiss
You know, so then I'm kind of infamous for for talking about doctors and how long it takes to get to learn things.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
yeah.

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Paul Preiss
Had to be good at it and a few things that you talked about. There were one of the things where there's a structural connections between elements took between working teams effectively. Communication barriers, structural dependencies, quote what are known by the IEEE is quality attributes, but also called.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
Yep.

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Paul Preiss
No, just non functional requirements which I have for the fact that we use that word.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
Uh-huh yeah.

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Paul Preiss
Or words excuse me, but the the so there was some implications in there that I want to understand. So you see that the silos do occur in in scaled agile, right? The the team start going their own way and those interdependencies become complex and require.

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Paul Preiss
Navigation if you will.

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Paul Preiss
And then is that, is that correct?

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Nick Tune (Guest)
I think in in general, yeah, I think I think as any company gets bigger and you have more and more teams it just. I think it's just a natural effective systems that they they becomes more of a siloed effects in and you have to counterbalance that by trying harder to negate it.

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Paul Preiss
OK.

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Paul Preiss
Right?

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Paul Preiss
And then then, let's talk a little bit about what it takes to be able to do that. Combined with the strategy elements, right? What are the kind of things he was like you were saying? You use event storming and you use these context workshops? What do you find out? The techniques, the skills, and the component that you know the the the that are necessary to navigate those waters?

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Nick Tune (Guest)
Yeah, so I think on a strategic level I'm having this conversation with someone at the moment, so they've they've already got autonomous teams. Each team is allowed to define its own, let's call them OK, Rs.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
But now the problem is what if teams have OK Rs which?

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Nick Tune (Guest)
Don't align in some way so one team wants to build.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
A certain

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Nick Tune (Guest)
new capability or feature.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
And another team wants to build.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
Something significantly different and independently. They're both good ideas, but from the company as a whole.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
They don't fit together cohesively, whereas if those two teams

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Nick Tune (Guest)
worked on different parts of the same problem, the value of building 2 cohesively related features would be much more valuable to the customer.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
Uh, and the business.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
So I think there's a need to work strategically. One of the techniques are used in that space is what's called a core domain chart, so and the other ones Worley mapping, I would say so. Endangerment design, basically.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
You break your company up into domains. You can think of it. You know it's pretty similar to business capabilities in a way like how do you logically view the different parts of your business based on some specialization such as the distichs, warehousing sales, those kind of areas.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
And then on the core domain shots, it's just two axes, so there's business differentiation across the X axes and complexity on the Y axis, and you map out your different domains.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
And you work out or you visualize how we want to evolve each of these domains. So, for example, you might say.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
We want to make this domain more complex because by by addressing in more complex problem, there's more differentiation there.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
And by making it by addressing a more complex problem.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
It's a more defensible position because it's a hard problem to solve if we solve this problem well. Compared to that, it won't be able to copy things easily.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
So then, once you've identified which of those domains is your call, you then think about how do the other domains need to evolve around that to support it. So if you're adding a new feature in in one of your core domains, you might need to make some changes in your supporting domains or develop a new generic domain.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
And and and those words basically mean domains which are.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
Necessary, but they're not your key differentiators, basically.

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Paul Preiss
Right, right, right.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
So I think the technique I tried to do is to find out what the company is called domains.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
What's what's the maximum?

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Nick Tune (Guest)
What's the maximum potential?

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Nick Tune (Guest)
The company sees in that core domain and then how did the other domains evolved to support that in large companies?

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Nick Tune (Guest)
And you probably have this going on in different business units. So each business unit has their own core domain and they weren't supporting domains and I think it looking at that that portfolio cohesively.

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Paul Preiss
Right?

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Paul Preiss
So it's interesting that you you talk about that because again, that's that's it. Or I find it interesting that you make the corollary between domains at certain scopes.

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Paul Preiss
The ends business capabilities and again we would call those differentiating capabilities and in more business architect terms. I guess we would call those differentiating capabilities. Or you know that potentially out sourceable, depending on how critical they are to the value streams developed or customer facing value streams etc. Or what I guess was traditionally called our core business like you said.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
Yeah.

00:17:56.670 --> 00:17:57.030
Nick Tune (Guest)
Yeah.

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Paul Preiss
So.

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Paul Preiss
What I guess I want to understand is how how do you see the kind of the linking though between these agile teams and this kind of thinking I? I mean, we've we've probably trained, you know, I don't know 7010 thousand people over the years, and I find that that.

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Paul Preiss
Uhm, is a it's a difficult, difficult skill set to find in your sort of average even group of agile teams.

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Paul Preiss
Or it it's also not necessarily desirable skill set by the the the, the, the teams themselves. And I mean, do you find that as well or do you find how do you find the the the teams to get you know again gathering up the ability to do this. 'cause obviously the old expression of fool with Atul is just so cool, right? Like it's actually, it's more like it's more like you know you can give a guy a chainsaw and that you know it. It just makes him dangerous, right?

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Paul Preiss
Like it doesn't make him into a Carpenter or, you know lumberjack or anything right? It's just.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
Yeah.

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Paul Preiss
So what what? What do you? I mean, how do we think? How do you think about?

00:19:17.030 --> 00:19:32.050
Paul Preiss
The the industry being able to adopt this into kind of agile practice and scaling scoping. You know what has to change between traditional IT management and didn't delivery and and now to be able to see this occur.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
Sure, well, I guess I'm not on authoritie on this topic, so I I'll share with you. My thoughts on this topic, but I don't want anyone to think I'm saying this is the the one true way. So maybe maybe if we if we start by looking at some observations about how teams work. So typically agile teams.

00:19:54.830 --> 00:19:58.310
Nick Tune (Guest)
But they're working iterations. They're very focused on.

00:19:59.250 --> 00:20:03.970
Nick Tune (Guest)
Delivery and also discovery, but largely.

00:20:04.840 --> 00:20:14.100
Nick Tune (Guest)
Largely within their team, so I think it's not. It's not something that agile teams do on a regular basis to think strategically, it's just not.

00:20:14.970 --> 00:20:18.840
Nick Tune (Guest)
If you've got your backlog, your road map you OK Rs.

00:20:19.630 --> 00:20:28.050
Nick Tune (Guest)
I mean, a lot of companies I think team. That's that's the scope of a team. You you have some shared rituals like you might have.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
You might be an agile team who works in a in what Spotify he called it, right? Like a group of teams working together so you have some joint ceremonies where you're demonstrating your new product improvements.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
But I just don't think strategic thinking and that in terms of core domains or core differentiating business capabilities. It's just not something that the average team member doesn't. Agile team in my experience, I think I can quite confidently say that it's not. I'm not trying to disparage them, it's just not.

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Nick Tune (Guest)
When, when when the field of software engineering talks about agile teams and ways of working?

00:21:08.540 --> 00:21:13.860
Nick Tune (Guest)
Strategies just not part of that conversation. It's like setting teams up to iterate quickly.

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Paul Preiss
Yeah, that's that's kind of what I mean. Is the the the even at the product owner level we talked about? You know backlog grooming and things so we have the the structural conversation going about team dependencies and whatnot. But when we look at things like backlog grooming and feature compositions and or you know value themes of.

00:21:36.320 --> 00:21:39.830
Paul Preiss
Over epics versus stories and things of that nature, right?

00:21:40.280 --> 00:21:41.110
Paul Preiss
Uhm?

00:21:42.450 --> 00:22:11.950
Paul Preiss
I find it even our product. I don't know. Do you find even that that at certain business scopes that are business stakeholders don't aren't aware of strategic tools to use to be able to extract OK Rs? I mean again, that's a OK Rs or something that we teach in, you know, in in in our our kind of basic basic architect training and I find getting people comfortable with even using them and understanding them. One of them. One of the measures of success. How are we going to track those?

00:22:12.530 --> 00:22:21.980
Paul Preiss
How did those linked to features functionality? Things like that right? Is that you're smiling. I I, I feel like I hit I hit a topic that maybe you have a comment on there.

00:22:23.090 --> 00:22:32.950
Nick Tune (Guest)
No, it's just funny because I'm I had that pretty much that exact problem this week or over the past couple of weeks. So one of the one of the teams I'm working with.

00:22:28.770 --> 00:22:29.200
Paul Preiss
No.

00:22:37.050 --> 00:22:52.640
Nick Tune (Guest)
Uh, I'm choosing my words carefully here. Let's just say I was asked if facilitates a workshop with with my colleagues to come to help this team. Part of road map together and the IT was with the tech leads and.

00:22:54.390 --> 00:22:56.130
Nick Tune (Guest)
They had some good ideas, but.

00:22:57.080 --> 00:22:57.710
Nick Tune (Guest)
Uhm?

00:22:58.520 --> 00:23:00.660
Nick Tune (Guest)
The the road maps they produced.

00:23:02.370 --> 00:23:09.780
Nick Tune (Guest)
And I think the road maps weren't very outcome focus. Let's say it was more or less of a man.

00:23:11.220 --> 00:23:16.330
Nick Tune (Guest)
It wasn't really deliverables either. It was. It was a list of ideas, let's say and.

00:23:17.510 --> 00:23:18.300
Nick Tune (Guest)
So.

00:23:20.680 --> 00:23:21.260
Nick Tune (Guest)
I think.

00:23:22.150 --> 00:23:27.990
Nick Tune (Guest)
In in general, that's quite common in this situation. We use the technique called impact mapping.

00:23:29.000 --> 00:23:32.980
Nick Tune (Guest)
So it's like OK, what we did is we said, what are you working on now?

00:23:34.180 --> 00:23:51.860
Nick Tune (Guest)
And we took those deliverables and we reversed engineered that to the business goals. And the company had a list of top five priorities and we said for each of these top five priorities, how does what you're working on now connect back? What's the business goal? What's the measurable business impact?

00:23:52.780 --> 00:24:19.140
Nick Tune (Guest)
So that that's one example, but I think that if I understand you correctly, I would say that's kind of a trend. Thinking getting people to connect what they're doing on a daily basis. Back to the high level business goals. And in this in this case it was the tech leads, so they were responsible. They've been engineers for a number of years, attack leads for their respective areas, and even they weren't able to stretch it too.

00:24:06.660 --> 00:24:07.230
Paul Preiss
Yeah.

00:24:20.040 --> 00:24:38.050
Nick Tune (Guest)
To really think strategically, and I think in in addition to the road map and the business goals, I think the key skill is being able to build narratives. It's about being able to tell the story of the work you're doing, how it fits in with the work of other teams in the company, how that connects back to business goals.

00:24:40.080 --> 00:24:52.140
Nick Tune (Guest)
And being able to express that in a way that would make sense to, let's say your CEO or CTO, I just think the average agile team is not good at that. And then I think your other point was about going up a few levels.

00:24:53.070 --> 00:24:56.340
Nick Tune (Guest)
Another company I worked out was moving from projects two products.

00:24:57.100 --> 00:24:58.190
Nick Tune (Guest)
And so there were these.

00:24:59.740 --> 00:25:07.440
Nick Tune (Guest)
They were called owners that they owned a platform or a products spanning multiple teams and I remember one conversation.

00:25:08.190 --> 00:25:10.560
Nick Tune (Guest)
And this person said to me, he said.

00:25:11.280 --> 00:25:14.960
Nick Tune (Guest)
Well, he said it in a group of people, not to me directly, but I was in the group, he said.

00:25:15.640 --> 00:25:21.910
Nick Tune (Guest)
My my stakeholder is just not giving me enough direction about what they want us to achieve in in this year.

00:25:22.970 --> 00:25:28.260
Nick Tune (Guest)
And he said I've got an email from from them and I said, oh can you, can you share the email with us?

00:25:28.870 --> 00:25:36.220
Nick Tune (Guest)
So he sent the email to the group and the email said this was his stakeholder. He's like responsible for that area of the business.

00:25:37.030 --> 00:25:38.660
Nick Tune (Guest)
And she said.

00:25:40.030 --> 00:25:42.750
Nick Tune (Guest)
I think that these might be the top priorities.

00:25:43.550 --> 00:25:52.630
Nick Tune (Guest)
But I'm gonna let you figure out what you thinks best. So to me the stakeholder was saying look you owned that platform.

00:25:53.960 --> 00:25:59.000
Nick Tune (Guest)
You do what you thinks best, and I'll tell you if I disagree, but for him.

00:26:00.340 --> 00:26:01.140
Nick Tune (Guest)
He was like.

00:26:01.870 --> 00:26:07.590
Nick Tune (Guest)
That's not prescriptive enough. I need to be told exactly what to do and this person was managing like.

00:26:05.630 --> 00:26:06.180
Paul Preiss
Right?

00:26:08.360 --> 00:26:27.360
Nick Tune (Guest)
Probably 40 or 50 people, and if someone at that level can't think strategically well, then the people working below them definitely can't think strategically. Well, not definitely, but if that's the culture and your leader can't think strategically, then you won't. You know they're not going to influence you to think strategically, either.

00:26:27.710 --> 00:26:35.740
Paul Preiss
Now see, I get I get this is this is one of those areas where I get really interested, but competency development is basically my.

00:26:36.790 --> 00:26:47.890
Paul Preiss
It's it it. It fascinates me constantly. How do you build people that give you consistent results? And I I don't know. I it's a really weird niche interest. I guess when you think about it but works well for for. For when I said this.

00:26:49.520 --> 00:26:55.870
Paul Preiss
And that's the the, the the notion that it. I mean it doesn't surprise me that manager.

00:26:55.920 --> 00:26:59.680
Paul Preiss
Uh, that can't think or doesn't think strategically.

00:27:01.030 --> 00:27:21.590
Paul Preiss
Not simply because it's not what they've been motivated to do. For debt, especially the technology manager, right? I mean are finding is that the motivators in organizations are very vertical, right? I I, I can't tell you the number of CIOs that I've seen take their direct reports just with them wherever they go and give them promotions wherever they get promotions.

00:27:21.970 --> 00:27:22.750
Paul Preiss
Uhm?

00:27:23.390 --> 00:27:30.280
Paul Preiss
You know it, whether that's because they're fantastic, or that's because they are part of that inner circle, and that person feels comfortable with them.

00:27:31.450 --> 00:28:01.040
Paul Preiss
I I don't, I mean so if you were like in and the reason I say this is again, I'm always looking for rigorous models by which we can develop the competencies that we need to do a particular job well and that that you know we don't motivate tech leads to think strategically. They're not incented on it, the even, even if you take Daniel Pinks model and you know the amp theory and you take away the notion of of money or reward and you start focusing on.

00:28:01.090 --> 00:28:12.570
Paul Preiss
Well then you know mastery autonomy. It's a group of people that are more motivated by design and and in depth engineering outcomes then they are in.

00:28:13.480 --> 00:28:14.720
Paul Preiss
Businesses stuff.

00:28:15.530 --> 00:28:28.440
Paul Preiss
And that's I think that's where now I don't know if you'd agree with this, but I ultimately this seems to be where the concept of architecture emerged was that there were just a group of those people who did naturally think about.

00:28:30.040 --> 00:28:34.910
Paul Preiss
Trade offs and balances and the bigger picture. And I had one CTO say.

00:28:36.540 --> 00:29:00.210
Paul Preiss
To me, as soon as somebody at a tech leader person who works in my in our groups comes into my office and says, well, I just don't understand why we're doing it this way. You know where is this going? How does this fit fit with the bigger picture? You know what does this do for our bottom line then? I know that I've can move them into the architect group because there's just that way of thinking.

00:29:02.420 --> 00:29:27.130
Paul Preiss
So I don't know what your thoughts are because again, I'm highly interested in in how do we get sustainable versions of this happening? Because while you you've got, you know we I see this in hundreds of companies that we talked to or speak at our conferences or part of the Chief Architect Forum or whatnot. Is this systemic failure to develop rigorous skills in this space?

00:29:28.650 --> 00:29:33.410
Paul Preiss
I I and I don't. I don't know how you feel about that. I mean, disagree I. That's why it's called the argument.

00:29:34.380 --> 00:29:45.910
Nick Tune (Guest)
Well, I I think the shed the shared ground we can have here is that there's a lack of strategic thinking. I don't know if this matches up with your experience, but every company I I know.

00:29:40.740 --> 00:29:41.210
Paul Preiss
Yeah.

00:29:47.140 --> 00:30:03.360
Nick Tune (Guest)
Everyone is super busy, they've got too much work and they don't know why and how it all fits together. I would probably say that's my honest opinion of lots of companies. There's just lots of stuff happening, but no one can articulate exactly why it's happening and.

00:30:03.080 --> 00:30:03.630
Paul Preiss
Yep.

00:30:24.160 --> 00:30:24.710
Paul Preiss
Sure.

00:30:25.110 --> 00:30:37.720
Nick Tune (Guest)
Because the because the leaders. Because the managers in it because middle managers and teams can't think strategically, they're not able to push back to senior leadership and say hang on a second. This isn't a good idea.

00:30:38.460 --> 00:30:50.130
Nick Tune (Guest)
And they're afraid to do that, and we don't have the strategic skills to do that. So I think that reinforces the culture by senior leadership thing. Oh my teams don't have ideas. Therefore I need to give them more ideas.

00:30:50.840 --> 00:30:56.640
Nick Tune (Guest)
So how? How do you solve that problem? I think I think education is one part definitely.

00:30:57.570 --> 00:30:58.390
Nick Tune (Guest)
I think if.

00:31:00.650 --> 00:31:14.470
Nick Tune (Guest)
And maybe that's what we get back to the architects. Maybe the role of the architect is to play the strategic role connecting the dots and also as an educator to help spread strategic thinking through the company. Perhaps that's one approach.

00:31:16.070 --> 00:31:18.730
Paul Preiss
Well, that's that's certainly our approach is to.

00:31:19.140 --> 00:31:24.540
Paul Preiss
Uh, you know is to to help teams for my teams and teams of teams.

00:31:25.810 --> 00:31:49.810
Paul Preiss
And organizational capabilities and groups to understand that digital transformation is a is a never ending process that that in fact what we want to focus on is more digital advantage, right? So in the sense of what are we getting in in terms of benefit out of these transforming activities, right? So you map your business processes at the way they are.

00:31:49.860 --> 00:32:21.510
Paul Preiss
Are in your event storming, but then what do they look like in a digitally transform world? Like if the pandemic, right? So if if if we're talking about embeddable devices or you know ecosystems of SAS vendors and and you know IoT devices and all you know kind of all of these things, how do you? How do you think about those strategically when maybe you're only familiarity with technology as a business person is?

00:32:21.600 --> 00:32:26.560
Paul Preiss
In WhatsApp and you know that your fault, your bank app and stuff like that.

00:32:27.170 --> 00:32:35.890
Paul Preiss
Uhm, and your technologists are embedded in real, deep, heavy duty programming.

00:32:36.720 --> 00:33:07.030
Paul Preiss
Engineering pattern work and I'm not saying that they're not 10s of thousands, hundreds of thousands of architects that are equally competent in those areas, but getting the the best of both worlds, right? That I I will never use the word bridge because like I always laugh because we're not bridges because bridges are meant to be walked on right. But leaders guides, you know stuff like that, but so we're right at time and I wanted to keep this to to this first interview.

00:33:07.080 --> 00:33:32.010
Paul Preiss
To 30 minutes I feel like, wait, there's just already another interview lined up. Maybe we can do a follow up in, you know, in a month or so. But I did want to kind of recap because I think you said some amazing things and actually impact mapping. Is is a thing I'd like to hear more specifically about. It sounds a little like reverse strategy scorecards to me or or balanced scorecarding in the sense of.

00:33:32.600 --> 00:33:37.970
Paul Preiss
Extracting from what we're building what we should, what, what, what the goal of that building is.

00:33:38.380 --> 00:33:39.800
Paul Preiss
Uhm which?

00:33:41.000 --> 00:33:44.670
Paul Preiss
Kind of strikes me is I don't know if do you feel like that's a little bass ackwards

00:33:44.720 --> 00:33:45.000
Paul Preiss
is.

00:33:45.970 --> 00:33:47.210
Paul Preiss
As we say in Texas.

00:33:48.740 --> 00:33:49.320
Nick Tune (Guest)
Yeah.

00:33:48.960 --> 00:33:51.950
Paul Preiss
Like we shouldn't have been building it until we knew those things.

00:33:51.820 --> 00:34:14.760
Nick Tune (Guest)
Yeah, that's exactly yeah what what the the. The most common reason I have using impact mapping is for helping people to figure out. OK, so you're working on something while you're working on it. Let's reverse engineer it to the business goal and then once you get to the business goal, you can say what's the best way to achieve that business goal? Is it the thing you're working on, or is there something else you could have been doing instead?

00:34:02.030 --> 00:34:02.580
Paul Preiss
Right?

00:34:15.010 --> 00:34:37.930
Paul Preiss
Right, right? Well, you know what I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna ask you to come back and dig into a couple of these techniques more, more specifically from one of the things I love to do on the on these shows is actually get real. Sort of OK, here's what you do first. Here's what you do. Second kind of advice. So we'll yeah, hopefully we can have a follow up, but scope and context. OK, Rs impact mapping.

00:34:15.730 --> 00:34:17.210
Nick Tune (Guest)
So yeah, it's backwards.

00:34:38.000 --> 00:34:53.760
Paul Preiss
Uhm, the pandemics impact on teams, domains, and ways of work. Domain driven design. Truly understand understanding a bounded context related to capabilities you're telling a really, I think.

00:34:53.810 --> 00:35:02.710
Paul Preiss
Uhm, valuable story. So 222 our industry and one that not enough people are talking about. So I really appreciate that.

00:35:02.840 --> 00:35:03.460
Nick Tune (Guest)
Thank you.

00:35:03.090 --> 00:35:27.290
Paul Preiss
Yeah, yeah, and I really appreciate you being on the argument this broadcast that we we have. It's been a couple of months or a couple weeks since episodes and I I plan on making up for that will have definitely have Nick back. But thank you all for listening and for tuning in. This will be also on YouTube in a couple of weeks, so thank you very much and look forward to talking to you. Thank you.

00:35:28.660 --> 00:35:29.100
Nick Tune (Guest)
Thanks.