Four Depths
Originally published on LinkedIn
Four words that describe the same system at different depths:
- Quantity. “We had 47 incidents last quarter.”
- Quality. “Our incident response is slow.”
- Structure. “Incidents cluster around deployments on Fridays.”
- Architecture. “The deploy pipeline was designed for a team half this size — incidents are the system telling us.”
Same system. Same data. Four different things you can see in it.
Most dashboards live at quantity. Most retros live at quality. The interesting conversations start at structure. The ones that actually change things happen at architecture.
It’s just a choice of words — but the words you reach for reveal which level you’re looking at.