Goal
Everything before this path makes one engineer excellent; this path makes the group better because that engineer is in it. The material is the engineering-practice theme plus the architecture-communication half of applicative architecture: writing decisions that scale beyond the room, reviewing code and designs as leadership acts, forecasting honestly, managing debt deliberately, and understanding the org chart as part of the architecture. This path is deliberately last-but-concurrent: its drills need real projects to practice on, which the other paths generously supply.
Prerequisites
- Software craft in full; distributed systems & data at least underway — design leadership needs designs worth leading.
Modules
1. Decisions, written down
- Read: Architecture documentation.
- Do: the note's drills — retro-document a system you know with C4; start an ADR log on your active project and keep it live.
- Proof: a newcomer navigates the system from your C4 + ADRs alone; every significant decision from the other paths' capstones has its record.
2. Review as leadership
- Read: Code review.
- Do: the note's drills — review real PRs (your projects, open source) with the note's discipline: fast, kind, substantive.
- Proof: a review sample where every comment is a question or a trade-off, the nits are automated away, and the author learned something.
3. Honest forecasting
- Read: Estimation & planning.
- Do: the note's drills — reference-class forecast a real deliverable, track actuals, recalibrate.
- Proof: your estimate archive with error bars that narrow over time; a "when will it be done?" answered as a probability range, defended.
4. Debt as a portfolio
- Read: Technical debt.
- Do: Gilded Rose: a technical-debt workout.
- Proof: the subject's retro deliverables — sealed estimates confronted, debt records written, and the business case that would convince a skeptical PM.
5. The org as architecture
- Read: Team topologies & Conway's law.
- Do: the note's drills — map a real org you've worked in onto the four team types; diagnose one delivery problem as a topology problem.
- Proof: the map, plus a written team-design proposal for a system from the distributed-systems path — services and teams, co-designed.
6. Leading without authority
- Read: Technical leadership.
- Do: the note's drills — the one-page strategy, the RFC run end to end, the delegation rep, the design review as a service.
- Proof: the strategy reviewed against reality after three months; one decision you drove to consensus without owning anyone's calendar.
Related
- The path to excellence — the master path; Stage 5's core and the curriculum's summit.
- Software craft — judgment formed there becomes leadership here.
- Distributed systems & data — supplies the designs worth documenting, reviewing, and staffing.
- Themes drawn on: Engineering Practice, Applicative Architecture.