The Technical Decision-Making Framework: Build vs Buy, Tech Stack, and Architecture Choices
A systematic approach to making high-stakes technical decisions that balance speed, cost, and long-term maintainability. Includes decision matrices, evaluation templates, and real-world examples.
Why Technical Decisions Keep You Up at Night
Every CTO faces decisions that could define the company's trajectory: Should we build or buy? Which database? Microservices or monolith? The wrong choice costs months of engineering time and millions in opportunity cost.
The problem isn't lack of options—it's too many options. Your team has strong opinions. Vendors make compelling pitches. But you need a systematic way to cut through the noise and make decisions you can defend to the board.
The rest of this framework is part of Pro
What you have read so far is the opening. The full framework — the worked detail, the numbers and the templates behind it — is included in the Pro plan, along with the rest of the Pro library.
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▶ Interactive tool
Put this into practice — free, no sign-up
Run your own numbers in these interactive tools built for exactly this decision.