When launching a new product, startup or project, it is tempting to build systems in preparation for inevitable success and scale.

But this frequently fosters premature complexity, such as a single team adopting micro-services well before they would be useful.

This talk provides guidance for how to manage complexity without sacrificing scalability by imagining the future but building for the now.

Leveraging Kruchten's 4+1 views - a model for designing and understanding software intensive systems through a set of independent but related views - we can decouple different types of scaling decisions and adopt appropriate patterns in each view when the time is right.

Kruchten's 4+1 views are the Logical/Domain view, the Process view, the Physical view, the Development view and the Scenario view. Scaling up in the logical view while deferring scaling of the process view helps avoid premature complexity, enhancing agility when the domain is less well understood and the model needs to evolve rapidly, and reduce the cost to build and operate.

This talk will help you understand the 4+1 views and how to apply them to make sense of your systems and plan yourself a flexible and effective scaling journey. Drawing on lived experience applying this technique to successfully scale a startup system over 7 years, we'll explore what went well, mistakes we made & tips for adopting this approach.