Setting direction, managing technical debt as a portfolio, and aligning architecture to business goals.
3 questions in Architecture & Tech Leadership.
Build what your users pay you for and buy the rest, correcting that heuristic for switching cost and data gravity. The comparison people get wrong is licence fee versus zero, when it is really licence fee versus salaries, on-call and opportunity cost for as long as the system lives.
Stop treating debt as a backlog of tasks and express it as a rate — the interest you are paying in change lead time, incident load and onboarding cost — then fund only the remediation that measurably moves one of those numbers. A fixed percentage tax is easy to agree and the first thing cut under pressure.
A strategy is a diagnosis, a small set of decisions already made, and the things you are choosing not to do — written so a team can tell whether next quarter's plan complies. Adoption comes from applying it to a live decision within weeks, wiring it into existing rituals, and making the compliant path the cheapest one.