The shared map your engineering team doesn't have

Most digital projects fail because nobody shares the same mental image in the team. I would argue this is the only problem that kills more projects and budgets than any other out there.

CEO, Product Manager, CTO, architect, tech lead and the engineers all have a mental image about what and how they are building. But short of hours and hours of 1-on-1 communication daily, their thinking drifts away from each other.

All well intentioned, none incompetent.

Yet they argue about coding language and tech stack instead of which experiment to run with customers.

They argue about increasing headcount or optimizing processes before even understanding the goal they need reaching.

They burn the midnight oil to reach an artificial deadline instead of asking, what do we gain by it or by delaying it?

This just means they never had a shared map.

I've seen this playing out over and over again on my 20+ projects across countries, even continents. Banking, telco, automotive and logistics. Even in game dev it is always the same. No matter the industry, no matter the scale.

Decisions are revisited, causing further delays without value to show for. Scope creeps in like water through soil, drowning the project in inefficiency. Every new engineer questions foundational elements before business value was even created, further slowing down progress.

Until one day, the project gets cut, the company reorganizes, the product shelved with all cost wasted. A small document could have avoided the outcome.

A map being updated as we go fixes the alignment with rather small overhead. This is a Tech North Star, that describes the agreement in clear language, what and how do we build, and why we decide this way.

I have spent countless hours in the last 10 years building these for teams, every time with a resounding success (one of my arch diagram stayed up on a whiteboard for over a year, referenced almost daily even in stakeholder convos).

In the coming weeks, I start releasing off-the-shelf versions.

More on that soon.