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Workflows, not technologies

When building infrastructure and applications, prioritize workflows before technologies. As you innovate, your technologies may change, but your workflows provide a foundation across systems. This approach ensures that even when you develop new technology, your way of doing things is not radically modified.

Workflows define how your team operates, how you deploy applications, how you handle incidents, and how you make decisions. These processes remain consistent even as technologies evolve. When you focus on workflows first, you create a stable foundation that can adapt to new tools and platforms. Technologies come and go, but effective workflows persist.

Build technology-agnostic workflows

Start by identifying your core workflows before choosing technologies. Your deployment process should be independent of specific tools. Focus on how code moves from development to production, how you validate changes before deployment, how you roll back when issues occur, and how you coordinate deployments across teams.

Create monitoring and alerting processes that work with any monitoring solution. Design how you detect and classify issues, how you escalate problems to the right people, how you document and learn from incidents, and how you measure and improve system health.

Establish change management processes that work regardless of your infrastructure. Define how you plan and review changes, how you test changes before production, how you communicate changes to stakeholders, and how you measure the impact of changes.

Implement workflow-first design

When designing new systems or processes, first ask what problem you are solving. Focus on the business need, not the technology. Then define how you want to work before choosing tools. Select technologies that enable your desired process, not the other way around. Finally, define metrics based on workflow outcomes, not tool features.

As your organization grows and technologies evolve, your workflows will need to adapt. However, the core principles should remain stable. Automate repetitive tasks in your workflows, keep workflow documentation updated as processes change, regularly review and improve workflows based on team feedback, and apply the same workflow principles across different teams and projects.

Next steps

In this overview, you learned about prioritizing workflows over technologies. This approach helps you build more sustainable and adaptable systems.

Refer to the following documents to learn more about team and culture practices:

If you are interested in learning more about workflow design and technology-agnostic approaches, you can check out the following resources:

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