Event Storming can help a lot to align and discover a domain. I will use this technique to share how I’m thinking of the domain and, with some luck, discover things that I wasn’t aware of with your help 😄

If you are unfamiliar with Event Storming, you can find plenty of articles and books discussing it online. Here is a 2 min introduction video.

You can check the Event Storming legend at the end of the article.

This post is part of the Team Cognitive Load series. Check this out for more context.

The big picture

I started modeling how I used the team cognitive load assessment from Team Topologies to continuously know the different teams’ cognitive load to make informed decisions.

The critical part of the process was when the team members answered the survey, I collected the information and presented the results to the team.

I modeled it through three events:

• Survey Answered. A team member answers the cognitive load assessment survey.

• Cognitive Load Assessed. The deadline to answer the survey is reached, and we calculate the cognitive load per team.

• Cognitive Load Reviewed. The cognitive load results are reviewed among the teams.

If you ask me to summarize the purpose of the Team Cognitive Load Application, I will respond that it’s about automating those three domain events.

The messy part before Survey Answered

Of course, more was needed to run the assessment among teams.

• Who belongs to which team?

  • Team Member Added to Team Event.

  • Maintaining a relationship in the spreadsheet between Team Members and Teams.

• How is the survey actually started?

  • Survey Started Event

  • Me creating a new Google Form with the Cognitive Load Survey.

• Who notifies that there is a cognitive load survey?

  • Survey Communicated Event

  • Me sending a Slack message or an email to notify people that we have the Cognitive Load Survey running (multiple times per week…)

The messy part after Cognitive Load Reviewed

Several things happen after reviewing the results with the team. The main one was how we interpreted and acted on the results.

• Did the impact of the previous actions on the teams’ cognitive load somehow?

• Is the platform team actually reducing stream-aligned teams’ cognitive load?

• What next action can we take to improve teams’ cognitive load?

Those questions can be seen as two main events.

• Action Added Event. When we want to improve the cognitive load in some area, we decide to define an actionable action that should be visible in the next cognitive load assessment.

  • Example: Add a Platform Team to reduce the operational cognitive load of Stream-Aligned Teams.

• Action Impact Reviewed Event. After the cognitive load assessment, we reviewed whether the actions we expected to impact positively actually made an impact. So, either we mark it as done, as it needs more effort, or as it is not impacting and, therefore, it can be discarded.

  • Example: Adding a Platform Team did not impact reducing the operational cognitive load on teams, but we saw an improvement in the testing experience.

DDDing Team Cognitive Load Domain app

I didn’t decide what’s core and what is supportive, but a first iteration can look like this.

I doubt whether Survey Answered event belongs to the supportive subdomain or the core domain. 💬 What do you think?

Leave a comment

Next steps

I will start coding the application based on that modeling and share those learnings while doing it. I also have been able to chat with some folks to do a user interview to learn more about their pains.

Do you want to join the private beta when available or help me do a user interview?

Add your email to the next link, and I will contact you.

https://forms.gle/YfsVUTwNch98m5VdA

Event Storming Legend

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Aleix's Learnings

Wardley Mapping Team Cognitive Load - Part 1/2

In the past, when I started a project, I used Lean Canvas to help me know my value proposition. I stopped using it. The Lean Canvas isn’t helping me at this stage. I can fill the canvas, but most of those points will be assumptions that will bring me a false sense of control or just generic enough that will apply to any project I…

Read more

3 years ago · Aleix Morgadas

The map

Based on what we learned, we could say:

But building on top of google sheets feels odd right? Let’s rethink the map with other components that fulfill those needs.

Rethinking the components

All the components I mentioned were used because the Team Cognitive Load Assessment uses Google Forms and google sheets underneath. Those two components influenced everything else we built on top.

Let’s start from scratch.

I will add another need that was implicit in the previous map, managing teams and their members.

What is needed to fulfill those needs?

We need four main components:

• Running the survey. Which notifies the team members to respond to the survey for a specific time frame.

• Team<>Members ’ relationship to know who belongs to which team when the survey is sent.

• Cognitive load survey results to calculate the teams’ cognitive load at one point.

• Cognitive load historic to see the evolution of teams’ cognitive load over time.

Those components will use off-the-shelf components such as:

• Notification system: either Slack or email

• PostgreSQL: because not building on top of spreadsheets should be obvious

Now it’s more clear what the project will do and what I should custom build :D

Next post: Team Cognitive Load tech stack

I will share what I decided to use to custom-build those components. I will share things such as:

• Libraries/Frameworks

• Deployment strategy

• Monitoring

• Databases

• Authentication system

Do you want to join the private beta when available?

Add your email to the next link, and I will contact you when it's available.

https://forms.gle/YfsVUTwNch98m5VdA

The Lean Canvas isn’t helping me at this stage. I can fill the canvas, but most of those points will be assumptions that will bring me a false sense of control or just generic enough that will apply to any project I start.

I started to ask myself the next question.

As you might guess, the answer is it depends.

Lean Canvas contains multiple dimensions, users, channels, problem-solution, revenue, costs, … damn! Too many things to take into account!

In my case, I consider that it doesn’t, as it could distract me from the important aspect of the project.

Verify the user value.

Instead, I will add all my assumptions and purpose into a Wardley Map to see if it makes sense what I am building.

Purpose

What is your purpose? Why does the project exists?

The project is born to help teams make better decisions using the cognitive load assessment without the overhead of continuously assessing it manually.

Scope

What is that you are mapping? What does it include? What does it not include?

I want to map how we used the team cognitive load assessment at Creditas from the technical leadership and developer perspective.

Users

What users interacts with the thing you are mapping?

• Technical leaders

• Developers

User needs

What do they need from you? What is each user journey?

• Technical leaders

  • Run the team cognitive load assessment

  • Verify the results over time

• Developers

  • Communicate the developer experience

Value chain

What sorts of things do you need to be doing to fulfill those needs?

• Team cognitive load assessment survey

  • Which produced a google sheets file with all the responses

• Manually processing the team cognitive load survey results

  • Using the google sheets with the cognitive load responses and,

  • A google sheets containing which person belong to which team

  • We were able to produce an overview per team of their cognitive load

• We created an snapshot of the resulting calculation to compare on the future

  • The comparison between cognitive load snapshots was manual and team per team.

Of course, everything builds on top of the most used technology on earth, a spreadsheet.

Map

Use the evolutionary characteristics to decide where to place each component along the evolution axis.

I used the Evolution Characteristics from Wardley Mapping to place the components on the evolution axis.

Challenging the map

As I was mapping, I identified that I was biased on where I placed Team cognitive load assessment. I thought it was in the Product (+ rental) stage. But it’s not! We needed to adapt the team cognitive load assessment to our own needs.

Therefore, we were custom building it based on a template and adapting it over time as we learned which questions worked and which didn’t. Plus, we considered the organization's context when sending the survey.

Situational awareness

The only way to make the project valuable for someone is to fight my own confirmation bias. Please, feel free to challenge any assumption I shared here! If the component is miss placed in your opinion, let us all know!

Do you want to join the private beta when available?

Add your email to the next link, and I will contact you when it's available.

https://forms.gle/YfsVUTwNch98m5VdA

Wardley Mapping Team Cognitive Load - Part 2/2

In the next post, I discuss how I aim to influence the map and how I will custom-build, rent, or outsource some components.

If you want to learn more about Wardley Mapping, check out this course by Ben.

Which is my experience with cognitive load from Team Topologies?

I have been following and learning from Team Topologies authors since they released the book in 2019. One of my key learnings was how cognitive load affects our day-to-day as developers and, consequently, how we deliver value to our customers.

In 2021, I joined Creditas as an Engineering Manager. Creditas had multiple exciting challenges, and I had the opportunity to apply several of the concepts from Team Topologies, one of them being the team cognitive load assessment.

One of my responsibilities as Engineering Manager, and later on as Head of Engineering, was engineering strategy. As you can tell, making a cohesive engineering strategy for multiple teams at different stages of maturity is challenging.

How could I impact most of the teams with less effort and investment?

Architecture, components, technologies, … all of those things are important. But if the teams cannot articulate the initiatives, you create a list of desires that won’t be accomplished.

Instead, I asked the teams which was their cognitive load with the team cognitive load assessment, and then, based on the results, acted accordingly.

By running the team cognitive load assessment, I learned two things:

1. Developers were eager to share their pains and collaborate to improve.

2. As leadership, collecting, analyzing, and keeping a history of how cognitive load evolves was tedious and manual and required training for each new leader that wanted to run the assessment.

The results of the actions based on the cognitive load were amazing. I didn’t expect an improvement in velocity, stability, autonomy, and team happiness that impactful.

But, the effort required to keep all that assessment running was too high. I would doubt that people are still running the assessments manually today.

I have two polarised experiences:

1. The decision-making when you assess the cognitive load improves.

2. Running the assessment over time is manual and time-consuming.

I want to reduce the management pain

What should you expect from this section?

I want to share with you all my journey while building this project. I will share things as:

• Technical decisions

• Software design

• Product decisions

• Domain modeling

Do you want to join the private beta when available?

Add your email to the next link, and I will contact you when it's available.

https://forms.gle/YfsVUTwNch98m5VdA

Check out the team cognitive load section

https://learnings.aleixmorgadas.dev/s/enabling-flow

You will find more posts about how the development is evolving :D