Wednesday
Room 2
16:20 - 17:20
(UTC+02)
Talk (60 min)
Enabling aligned decentralised architecture decisions through user needs mapping
Our goal is to help teams maintain their delivery flow, enabling them to focus on delivering business value without getting stuck waiting on others. This requires decentralised architecture decisions, empowering teams to act independently. But decentralisation has challenges. Decisions made to optimise for one team’s users can unintentionally reduce resilience or harm the user experience for others downstream. To avoid this, teams are often expected to consider the organisation-wide impact of decisions, increasing cognitive load and disrupting flow. The challenge: how can teams stay aligned while making decentralised decisions without being overwhelmed? In this talk, we’ll share how user needs mapping helps teams make aligned, decentralised decisions. User needs mapping is the value chain layer of a Wardley Map, enriched with clear team responsibilities. Mapping the value chain and defining boundaries give teams a clear view of user needs and who else—stream-aligned or platform teams—is involved. This clarity fosters productive conversations to identify dependencies and align requirements. By connecting maps across teams, we create a foundation for resilient, well-informed decisions. We’ll share how we facilitated these sessions and ensured the maps remain actionable and up to date.
Kenny Baas-Schwegler
I believe in collaborative software design where *‘every voice shapes the software’*. Leveraging a domain-driven design approach with Team Topologies, I facilitate clearer communication between stakeholders and software creators by collaborative modelling and deep democracy, decoding complexities, resolving conflicts and ensuring software remains agile to business demands.
As an independent software consultant and trainer, I specialise in technical leadership, software architecture, and sociotechnical system design. I work with organisations and teams to design and build sustainable and resilient software architecture.
Thomas Krag
As a Fast Flow consultant, Team Topologies Valued Practicioner and experienced technology leader, Thomas helps organizations optimize their software delivery processes by focusing on the human elements as much as the technical ones. Thomas' approach is rooted in understanding that modern technology challenges are inherently socio-technical – they require solutions that consider both systems and the people who build and use them.
Drawing from his background as a platform engineer and technical lead, he brings hands-on experience in DevOps practices, Platform Engineering, and Team Topologies. He's particularly passionate about helping organizations optimize for fast flow and building platforms that lower cognitive load rather than act as a constraint. This perspective has been shaped by years of working at the intersection of technology, process, and people at anything between startups and global scale enterprises.
His work combines strategic thinking with practical implementation, focusing on areas such as Platform Engineering, Product Thinking, and organizational design. He helps teams and organizations navigate the complexity of modern software delivery while keeping the human element at the center of technical solutions.