Off-the-shelf Tech North Stars
Ready-made solution and enterprise architectures for different archetypes and industries. Download free packages or buy the enterprise packs to shave off months of efforts from your tech organizations!
Each pack below is neat off-the-shelf package with C4-style diagrams and Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), covering data regulatory and security architecture angles available for different size, maturity and industry below. Take the individual package or our premium subscription to access all current and upcoming Tech North Stars.
Each package is expert crafted based on years of industry experience!
The value of a Tech North Star
We know almost all software/digital projects are above budget and delayed beyond deadlines. In most cases this is due to the different stakeholders and the team are not on the same page on what and how should be delivered, targets change mid-project. New ideas come in and divert the team while unfinished work piles up, laying wasted.
A Tech North Star solves a big chunk of this by:
- keeping a record of the important decisions,
- showing an up to date map of the tech landscape,
- and tracing the requirements to implementations.
The often under-valued documentation becomes the heart of the team, stakeholders and centers the user needs beyond all. It drives the project to ultimate success by having a shared mental model for all participants.
An engineer questions a decision taken a year ago? Records will show the why, can be argued and changed fact-based, not mood and feeling based.
Index
| Small-scale | Medium-scale | Enterprise-scale | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Context | Few engineers can develop in few weeks. | A dozen or so engineers and support staff of 10-30, 3-4 months to half a year scope. | 2-3 well-rounded squads on year long horizon, up to 1-2 tribes. |
| Projects | Sales funnel (few to dozens of steps) | Logistics management platform (coming soon) | Current account banking microservices (coming soon) |
| Future plans | Self-service diagramming tool | Omnichannel sales funnel for multiple products | Scalable banking core system |
| SaaS service of simple products | E-commerce platform | Agentic platform for multi-tenant services | |
| Digital unsecured cash loan product | Modular monolith multi-regional platforms |
What if I use genAI to do my code? I don't need a tech vision for that.
For a quick prototype, you are right, no need for these packages. However the moment you need a real product, quality, scaling, security (not leaving the API keys in the frontend!), you immediately need to switch to a real architecture.
In most jurisdictions, the moment you have money switching hands, you are liable for a lot of regulations and laws and industry guidelines. Not knowing about them, and not serving your customers in a proper way, e.g. guarding reasonable their data and privacy is not an exception anywhere.
You can benefit in two ways from these packages, suggesting to do both:
- Read the content. I know it is long, but if your product is really creating value, it worth your time to learn about how a good architecture looks like. It shows you the decisions, reasoning and problems you can handle and avoid.
- Feed it into your choice of AI assistant and compare it against your existing codebase. It will help you identify much better what is missing, what wasn't thought of. Especially ask for the ADRs to be generated over from your code.
Personal experience, genAI generates really bad ones, around half of them usually are not even architecture nor decisions but topics. Still better to surface those as conscious items and these packages help guide you in it.
I already have a product developed for years, it is fine without a tech north star.
Yes, and it will be, however, do you experience at least one of these?
- weird and complicated bugs, recurring even if it seems fixed;
- cost of server seems high, especially at peak service (biggest sign is if you don't even know the answer to this);
- adding any new feature seems to be touching all the codebase,
- colleagues routinely confused about which part of the system anyone talks about or what a change will affect.
I could list a lot more of the points, but any of the above is already resonating with you, you need a tech north star built for your product.
And one of these packages can help you started, but won't take over and replace your decisions. It guides you to build yours.