An important part of architecture modernization is building a vision of the modernized architecture. This enables you to identify the opportunities and challenges in each area and plan your journey from the current state to the future vision. To do this, you’ll need a language—a set of building blocks—for describing your architecture, from a top-level macro view to individual software applications.
There is no universally accepted language for describing architecture. So you’ll need to choose—or invent—one that works for your business. In this chapter, I’ll show you one possible approach, called a product taxonomy. It’s a set of building blocks for describing architecture driven by a company’s products and the business and customer outcomes they enable.
I recommend a product-centric approach because it helps you to design an architecture and organization structure for empowered product teams with sustainable fast flow optimized for key business outcomes. But you don’t have to use the building blocks presented in this chapter to benefit from the ideas in the book. It’s just one possible approach (although a good, sensible default). You can translate to your preferred building blocks accordingly.