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 in our talk as we demonstrate how we embedded user needs mapping within an organisation to enable aligned decentralised architecture decisions. User needs mapping is the value chain component of a Wardley Map, enriched with clear team responsibilities. By using this value chain and defining responsibility boundaries, teams gain a clear map of what is needed to address their users' needs. It also highlights which other teams—whether stream-aligned or platform teams—are involved. This allows teams to engage in meaningful conversations to identify dependencies and requirements across the organisation. By mapping these onto other teams’ user needs maps, we create a foundation for teams to rapidly understand the impact of their decisions and their interactions, resulting in more resilient and informed decentralised decisions. You'll walk away with insights into how we facilitated these sessions with the teams, and how we ensured the maps remain current and actionable.