Using an 'architectural North Star' to align your engineering team with your organization

In a fast-growing, agile organization, teams are usually encouraged to self-organize. Equipped with the guiding principles such as fast iteration and frequent feedback loop with the customers, we entrust the most valuable asset, people, to make informed decisions.

The agile approach may effectively maximize the value output in an individual team but it doesn’t guarantee that your entire organization is collectively building toward the same goal. This is where the architecture north star comes in. The exercise of defining an architecture north star creates alignment in the organization. With this shared direction, your team is able to be autonomous in the day-to-day decision making while building towards the broad vision.