Enabling aligned decentralised architecture decisions through user needs mapping

Workshop

Our goal is to enable teams to maintain their flow of delivery, allowing them to focus on delivering continuous business value without being held up by dependencies on other teams. This requires teams to make decentralised architecture decisions whenever possible. However, decentralised decisions can have unintended consequences across the organisation. For example, a team’s decision to optimise for their specific user might negatively affect the resilience or user experience of another team downstream. To prevent this, teams are often forced to consider the wider organisational impact of each decision, which adds to their cognitive load and disrupts their flow. The challenge is: how do we foster alignment across teams so they can make decentralised architecture decisions without being overwhelmed by the complexity?

Join us for this hands-on session where you’ll learn how to perform user needs mapping to enable aligned decentralised architecture decisions. User needs mapping is the value chain component of a Wardley Map, enriched with clearly defined team responsibilities. In this workshop, you’ll work in groups, each assuming the role of a software team with its own unique context and landscape. You’ll begin by mapping the user and their needs based on the information provided to each team member, then connect the software components required to meet those needs. As you outline your team’s boundaries, you’ll also uncover gaps in your team’s knowledge. Once each team has completed its map, you’ll collaborate with other teams to fill in those gaps—sharing insights, mapping inter-team dependencies, and refining your value chain to finalise your user needs map. By the end of the session, you’ll have a solid grasp of user needs mapping, understand how it supports resilient and informed decentralised decisions, and learn how to keep these maps up-to-date and actionable.

Speakers

Thomas Krag