the brief — the journey (technical path)
The Journey — technical path
The technical Journey maps how data or requests move through the system today — where they travel, where they fail, and what the human consequence of each failure is. It traces the system's path. The human consequence appears at each failure point — this connects the technical work back to the problem it exists to solve.
A flow without human consequences is documentation. A flow with them is a brief.
Uri's billing flow — observed
1. Billing cycle triggers at 23:45 on the 1st of the month
Scheduled job processes ~3,400 subscription charges across all active customers. One monthly run — no retry window if it fails.
2. Charges submitted to Cardcom one by one by a single worker
At month-start peak, the worker cannot clear the queue at pace. Cardcom rate-limiting amplifies the backlog.
Failure: p99 response time exceeds 4.2s — cannot keep pace at peak
3. 993 charges fail silently — no error surfaced, no retry, no log
Customers mid-price-change have a stale plan reference. Dropped at validation. Nothing surfaced, nothing recoverable.
Failure: silent drop — no recovery path, no visibility, no alert
Human consequence: customers are not charged. Revenue leaks. Some notice and call support weeks later; most do not.
4. Manual Cardcom reconciliation — every month, seven months running
Uri: 25 minutes every billing cycle, cross-checking Cardcom settlements against ECW subscription records, filing tickets for each drift.
Human consequence: a workaround absorbed into the routine. The cost is invisible because it has been normalised. The trust deficit persists even after the technical issue is fixed — unless the brief names it.
How to apply this
- ✓ Write the flow from observation — logs, monitoring, watching a real cycle — not documentation. Documentation describes intended behaviour. Observation reveals actual behaviour.
- ✓ Continue the flow through the workaround. Step 4 is the most important step. It shows the accumulated human cost of leaving the failure in place.
- ✓ Does every failure point have a human consequence? If not, the brief is incomplete. The human consequence links the technical work back to the problem it exists to solve.