Domain
Technology
The systems, tools, and integrations the team uses to do their work — and the small, persistent friction that adds up to half a day a week.
Technology is the domain in which frustration is the most measurable and the most easily dismissed. "It's just a tool." "Click through the dialog." "Use this workaround." Each individual workaround takes 90 seconds. Multiplied across a team, across a year, it is months of skilled labour spent on the seam between two systems that don't talk to each other.
The architecture is rarely the tool itself. The architecture is the absence of an owner for the seam. Procurement bought the system. IT runs the system. The team uses the system. Nobody owns the friction that lives between the system and the next one.
Removing this kind of frustration almost always means naming a single owner for an integration nobody wanted to own — and giving them the air cover to say no to features until the friction is fixed.
Dr. Tim Hough · ISBN 979-8-9965397-1-0 · Buy the book →
Diagnostic
If the same workaround appears in three different team retros and the response each time is "yes, we know about that one," you are not looking at a tooling problem. You are looking at an unowned seam.
Run the diagnostic
Explore this domain in depth once you have a workspace.
Deep link: /field-guide/technology
Source: Why Your Best People Stop Trying. Dr. Tim Hough.