Moving to Management and Other Tales of Evolutionary Architecture

"Why would anyone leave any technical role for a management position?!" I remember asking others on more than one occasion. I would also usually add a semi-disgusted facial expression that would cause general hilarity and then we would swiftly move on.

Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.

Today my title is Head of the Customer Circle, leader of a tribe embracing multiple squads in the IT Division of a large global fashion company called BESTSELLER. As part of top management, I refer directly to our CIO.

But…why? Why did I make this (in my personal opinion) groundbreaking career move?

It Is Because I Love Software Architecture

We live in an amazing time in history. Information travels freely at the speed of light for whoever wants to listen, for the brave and true who want to continuously learn and improve. Specifically, in IT, this has brought in the industry an explosive growth in the open source community which, through its practice of sharing knowledge and ideas, sparked an immensely powerful reinforcement circle which is currently bringing together thousands of IT professionals from around the globe. Cloud computing, as we know it today, was born here (or at least the part that really matter), together with so many other amazing technologies.

Tasks and processes that were expensive and painful are now fully automated, allowing us to build amazing applications that are able to change and grow at the speed of literally any business. We can now build software that adapts intelligently and continuously to ever-changing real-world scenarios; we are talking about self-healing systems optimized for incremental changes.

In Other Words, Evolutionary Architecture

There is a single small issue with Evolutionary Architecture: it is bound to fail in traditional enterprises.

You can fake it, but without a deep re-organization of the way enterprises build software today, without changing the processes around its classical software life cycle models, you will not make it. You won't be able to harvest fully its potential and in the most common scenarios you will walk straight into a very painful and truly expensive kind of hell.

The very first step of adopting Evolutionary Architecture at scale in a sustainable way is the creation of autonomous and self-organizing teams, each of which has ownership over a specific set of independent products. In order to drive that kind of change you need to have the mandate, you must join management.

The Ultimate Step Out Of My Comfort Zone

I am now a manager because I want to allow the enterprise I work for to move lightning fast, leveraging the power of IT systems that are extremely flexible and reliable. Together with the rest of our management team, we will allow our truly skilled technical staff to succeed in delivering amazing solutions, creating the conditions needed to begin the journey towards Evolutionary Architectures and acquire the agility our enterprise needs to rule in today's markets and industries.

What's Next?

Interested in knowing the next step for succeeding in adopting Evolutionary Architecture at scale in a large enterprise? Once you have your teams lined up and well defined, you will need to automate the instantiation of architecture blueprints in order to simplify and automate heavy enterprise processes as architectural quality assurance, compliance, risk and security assessment and so on.