factor10 Solution Designer

Software initiatives rarely fail because nobody worked hard. They fail because different people – business stakeholders, developers, operations, support – end up with different pictures of what's actually being built and why. Decentralised decision-making, where teams make good calls quickly and in the right direction, depends on everyone sharing that same underlying intent.

factor10 Solution Designer brings structure to that conversation without turning it into a document nobody reads. It's built for teams who value clear thinking and want a single, coherent tool rather than a stack of disconnected templates.

What it covers

The tool guides you through the aspects that are important and helpful for most software initiatives. Here are some of the covered aspects:

• Strategy briefing: a clear and concise statement of intent, inspired by mission command, to help keep daily decisions in line with the overall goal.

• Sub-domains: a way of mapping which parts of your business give you a competitive edge, which ones support it, and where a standard solution is enough.

• Context Map: making it explicit where the boundaries are between models and teams, and how they relate to one another socially.

• EventStorming: starting from what happens in the business, not from the data model, to surface events, decisions, and boundaries as they naturally occur.

• Economics: an early, order-of-magnitude view of the initiative's likely revenue and cost impact, using throughput accounting rather than detailed budgeting and cost-based accounting.

Not every aspect will be equally interesting to all stakeholders. The filter at the top lets people focus on the perspectives most relevant to their role, and skip the rest.

Where it comes from

Solution Designer draws on ideas we at factor10 rely on across our own consulting work: Domain-Driven Design, Test-Driven Development and Extreme Programming, Theory of Constraints, Continuous Delivery, Team Topologies, and Stephen Bungay's The Art of Action. If you recognise the concepts, you'll recognise the tool.

Why you should use it

Because the alternative is usually one of two extremes: too little structure, where important questions surface too late, or too much structure, where nobody reads the document. Solution Designer aims for the middle: enough structure to catch the things that are genuinely hard to fix once you've started building, without slowing you down or locking you into a rigid process.

We use it ourselves, for our own initiatives. In our experience, what's been designed together tends to get built together.