Diagram Your Architecture

Clarify complicated systems, by having insightful and consistent architecture diagrams across your whole team.

You’ll walk away with a consistent way for everyone on your team to create diagrams, which are also diagrams of your own actual system, plus you’ll keep the knowledge of how to coordinate big changes by spotting issues on the architecture diagram!

Good to know!

• We’re going to be a small and focused group. That means we can have high quality discussions, interactive work, and great learning outcomes.

• Yes, we really discuss your software architecture, not a clean prepared slide deck where everything works out easily.

• You’ll learn how to:

  • Spot architecture issues and team structure issues just from the diagrams alone

  • Communicate your architecture to technical and non-technical stakeholders

• You get to keep the Miro board and take the diagrams back to your team

2-6 People per session

Send an email to book a workshop:
Brian@BuildingBetterTeams.de

How does it work?

✅ Entirely online
⏳Only 4 hours (4 hours + 1 hour break)
🆙 Intermediate level and up
📝 Walk away with real diagrams of your architecture
🤝 1-hour follow-up call any time in the next 30 days.

Learn C4 Diagrams

• Learn how to use C4 Diagrams every week in your actual team to drive meaningful architecture discussions and get aligned quickly

• How to spot system design problems on a diagram, which means you don’t spend the next 3 months finding them in production.

• You’ll learn all 4 levels of C4 diagrams, allowing you to explain the system to an engineer or a sales person.

• How to avoid very common diagram mistakes, meaning you can keep diagrams clean and readable long-term.

• How to document your actual software system, so you don’t get stuck wondering how to document your edge-cases

Why C4 Diagrams?

“C4 diagrams” have quickly become the “go-to” default for many teams who want to architect their systems because of its simplicity and pragmatic approach to documenting software. You won’t need to learn dozens of special meanings of different arrowheads or box types — more like just 2 or 3 very intuitive ones.

Your Facilitator

Brian Graham

• A diagram of absolutely everything in your architecture.

  • You will get a “Thin Slice” of your architecture. We will cover a large amount of high-level context, but as we get deeper into the details we will focus in on only modeling narrower sections. We do this to ensure your team knows how to do all 4 levels of C4 architecture diagrams on their own after the workshop.

  • This workshop is meant to teach you how to do it on your own and get you started with your own architecture diagrams. But because really tricky problems never show up right away, you also get an extra 1 hour call up-to 30 days after the session so we can ensure your success.

• A model of how to restructure your teams around your architecture, or how to re-architect a system

  • Our goal here is to document what exists today, and give you the tools to plan for tomorrow.

  • We’re happy to do another session later with you on Team Topologies, but getting good at C4 is already a lot to do in just 4 hours.

• Advice on what to build next

  • We’re happy to help you build the diagrams to explain what you want to build next, and we’re happy to identify and call-out common flaws in system design, but we won’t be able to go deep enough into the specifics of your business to design your future architecture for you. For that, we’ll need to book a special workshop and learn much more about your business.

Brian's guidance fostered collaboration and alignment within and across teams and enabled us to design better architectures. I can highly recommend his C4 workshop.

Masashi Beheim, VP Engineering @ Parloa

The Diagram your Architecture workshop with Brian helped to breakdown the thought process of practically applying the C4 Architecture model. I have gone from drawing cluttered and confused diagrams which didn't aid conversations to now being able to produce clear and consistent diagrams which I continually refer back to in conversations with both technical and non-technical people.

Ken Ross, Lead Developer @ DrDoctor

What do you need to bring?

Because we’re really going to model your architecture, we’ll need you to bring a few things with you!

• We’ll need a list of your "big products", and an idea of one or two that are the most important to model in the session.

• A list of people who interact with your system (users, personas, etc).

• Any existing architecture diagrams you might already have

• A list of running systems in production (including 3rd party systems you depend on). Be sure to include anything you “deploy” or “release”.

• Pick one or two code repos we can take a look at if we need to.

• The absolute basics of using Miro (drawing boxes, writing text, adding lines between boxes). You’ll need to draw!

Who should attend?

This workshop is aimed at tech teams inside startups (usually in a growth phase) with more than one team. Often we see companies want to train their tech leads first and follow-up with team specific training afterwards.

This session is usually sought out to help document architecture that exists before onboarding a new wave of hires, or to help get alignment on system design before a large change (either many new features or re-designing of large systems).

If you belong to a very large company with more than 10 teams we should design a special session together, so say “hi” out via email instead: brian@buildingbetterteams.de .

More than just a workshop!

• Unlock the skills that belong in your next performance review

  • Better architecture communication

  • Better planning

  • Better system design

• Bring your whole team! Our sessions are focused on one specific company, so one ticket covers up-to 5 people from your company.

• Interactive workshops in Miro lets every participant learn by DOING instead of just watching!

• Your diagrams will help onboard new developers and get them independent faster

Have questions?

Just send your workshop facilitator Brian an email!:
brian@buildingbetterteams.de