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Tech Lead

The technical decision is sound. Is it sound for the outcome?

How Value Erosion shows up for you

A Tech Lead makes dozens of decisions a week that look purely technical: libraries, boundaries, what to refactor, what to defer. Value Erosion happens when those decisions are justified only by technical merit. Friction (debt, dependencies, slow pipelines) accumulates in places that do not matter to the metric, and the places that do matter stay painful.

Three questions to ask before building

  1. 1

    Which business metric does this technical decision protect or improve, and which friction does it add?

  2. 2

    What is the cheapest version of this design that still lets us learn whether the hypothesis holds?

  3. 3

    If this decision turns out wrong, how expensive is it to reverse, and does the value at stake justify that risk?

The first 15 minutes

Add value and friction lines to your next design decision

  1. Pick the next technical decision on your plate, or the last ADR you wrote.
  2. Add two lines: "Value it serves: [metric or hypothesis]" and "Friction it adds: [debt, dependency, manual step]".
  3. Share it with your Product Owner before the team commits, and ask whether the value line is correct.

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.