← All roles

Solutions / Technical Architect

The architecture is elegant. What impact hypothesis does it serve?

How Value Erosion shows up for you

For an Architect, Value Erosion is architecture designed for an imagined future instead of a stated hypothesis. Quality attributes are optimized in the abstract, patterns are chosen because they are current, and the expected business impact is not an input to the evaluation. The result is a platform that is correct, expensive and weakly connected to what the business is trying to change.

Three questions to ask before building

  1. 1

    What is the impact hypothesis this architecture must make possible, and what does it need to prove first?

  2. 2

    Which quality attributes matter for this hypothesis, and which are we paying for without a reason?

  3. 3

    What is the smallest architecture that lets the first Quick Value Release ship, and what options does it keep open?

The first 15 minutes

Evaluate your current design against one hypothesis

  1. Write the impact hypothesis for the initiative in one sentence, with a metric and a time frame.
  2. List the three architecture decisions that cost the most, and mark which of them the hypothesis actually requires.
  3. Bring the unmarked ones to your next design review as candidates to defer.

Start here

Run the diagnostic

Five questions tailored to your role.

Prompts for your role

Copy-paste prompts framed around outcomes.

Claude skills

See how each skill applies to your seat.

Templates

Free templates picked for your role.

Work it through with the Assistant

A thinking partner for a real project from your role.