Use a Tech Radar to coordinate new technology adoption on your team
In the dynamic realm of technology, change is the only constant. As the VP of Engineering at Invisible Technologies, I’ve learned that our success hinges not only on our ability to embrace new technologies but also on our capacity to do so strategically.
Engineers thrive on innovation, but the rapid evolution of tools and frameworks can sometimes lead to chaos. It’s a delicate balance between harnessing the power of the latest advancements and preventing them from becoming a Pandora’s box of unforeseen challenges.
What Problems Are We Solving?
As the size of your team grows you need to have a strategy around what new technologies you wish to adopt. As an engineering leader you don’t want to stifle innovation but it is also very difficult to maintain a codebase written in numerous languages that not everyone on the team is familiar with.
As you onboard more and more people the tribal knowledge of “how we do things” can become diluted and unclear. I’ve found that this problem is especially pronounced on remote teams where engineers are working in different timezones and can’t always easily ask questions. You have to start writing things down. We’ve found the Tech Radar structure to be a good balance between top down tech choices and uncoordinated chaos.
Tech Radars allow structured evaluation and consensus
One tool that I’ve found to help simplify this challenge for our globally distributed team is the Tech Radar. The original inspiration for this technique comes from Thoughtworks Tech Radar. On my team we’ve adapted this approach using Notion to help bring structure to our change management process and to help organize our meeting notes, architecture documents and external research.
How We Evaluate New Technologies
Our implementation has 5 stages that allow everyone on the team to know what technologies we’ve adopted as a team, what we’re moving away from and what new technologies we might decide to adopt.
- Research: This is brand new and we’re just reading about it, at this phase if you’re also interested in this new technology this allows you to drop your name in the hat as being interested.
- Assess: At this point we’ve identified a champion who wants to adopt this technology. We’ll bring it up in our weekly team call to discuss the pros and cons and ensure that anyone who might have been missed has an opportunity to share context.
- Trial: We’ve identified a proof of concept or a project where we want to use this new technology. The champion who’s advocating for its adoption is still moving the technology forward and will report back at the end of the project.
- Adopt: At this phase this is a technology that we’re fully going for. This technology is “the standard way of doing things” and all new team members should work to understand these technologies.
- Hold / Deprecate: There are two ways to get here. Either we discovered issues in the technology during one of the earlier phases and decided not to move forward with it OR it’s a technology that we did use for a period of time that we’ve decided to migrate away from.
Documents become the internal Homepage for that Technology
We make heavy use of relationships between Notion databases. Our Meeting Notes, System and Architecture Documents, and Incident Reports all link to the Technology Radar database. This allows us to have a 360 degree view of other documents in Notion related to this technology.
We also collect links to documentation, tutorials and blog posts about this technology to ensure that anyone who isn’t familiar with it has a good place to learn more.
Adopting a Tech Radar has helped us to reduce ambiguity and increase velocity
In the ever-evolving landscape of technology, the Tech Radar has proven to be our guiding compass, helping us navigate the turbulent process of evaluating new technologies with precision and purpose.
By following the five stages, fostering collaboration, and embracing documentation, we’ve not only kept pace with emerging technologies but have also paved the way for our team to excel and innovate. I encourage tech leaders and enthusiasts alike to explore the benefits of implementing a Tech Radar within their organizations. Embrace the opportunities, manage the risks, and together, let’s chart a course towards a future where technology adoption is not a challenge but a strategic advantage.
