What it is
Every architecture decision is a bet on the product’s future, and bets need direction. The first AARM stage exists to confirm, with the business in the room, which strategic objectives the architecture must enable. It is not a strategic planning workshop: it is a short, recurring check that technology and business are reading the same map.
The outcome is a set of 3 to 5 strategic objectives written in business language, which become the prioritization criteria for everything that follows. If a risk or an architectural story connects to none of them, it probably doesn’t belong at the top of the backlog.
How to facilitate the session
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What is the product vision?
Start at the horizon: where does this product want to go? The vision rarely changes; if no one can answer it, that is already the session’s first finding.
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What is the product mission?
What the product does, for whom, and why. The mission marks out the playing field before you discuss how to win on it.
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What are the strategic objectives right now?
Select, ideally, 3 to 5. The number matters: fewer impoverishes the analysis; more means nothing is truly a priority.
Reference strategic objectives
Use the list below as a starting menu for the conversation with product and business leadership, and resist the urge to tick everything.
AARM Toolkit
The complete kit of fillable templates for the 4 stages: strategy canvas, ilities matrix, risk-storming board, architectural story, ADR and backlog.
Common mistakes
- Selecting ten objectives. When everything is a priority, nothing is. The 3-to-5 discipline is what makes the next stages decidable: trade-offs only exist when something is left out.
- Running the session without the business. Strategic objectives deduced by engineering are hypotheses, not confirmations. Without product and business in the room, the stage loses its alignment function.
- Confusing a feature with an objective. "Launch the new checkout" is an initiative; "increase conversion" is an objective. Architecture connects to the latter, which is the one that survives roadmap changes.