Decentralized architecture is often celebrated as a technical design choice defining service boundaries, team APIs, and infrastructure independence. But autonomy on paper doesn't guarantee alignment in practice.
When architecture becomes distributed, the challenge isn't just how the system is designed, it's how decisions get made, shared, and trusted across teams. In Lindsey Tibbitts' organization, Fleetworthy, that reality became clear as they grew rapidly and integrated multiple newly acquired companies
Teams were empowered in theory, but still struggled in practice. Architects became bottlenecks. Developers either waited for permission or made decisions in isolation. Autonomy existed, but confidence didn't.
Reading "Facilitating Software Architecture" by Andrew Harmel-Law gave Tibbitts a language and a path for addressing that gap. The book offers lightweight, trust-based practices like the Architecture Advice Process, Architectural Decision Records (ADRs), and Advice Forums that help organizations build technical alignment without falling back on centralized control.
This full version of this article reflects Tibbitts' personal interpretation of Facilitating Software Architecture as applied in a real-world, post-acquisition engineering context.
The article shares how the organization started applying those ideas inside a real, multi-team engineering environment. It's not a success story, it's a reflection on what happens when an organization tries to shift from control to trust, from approval to advice, or from isolation to visibility.
What follows is a set of lessons, tools, and cultural shifts that have helped us evolve toward a more resilient, decentralized architecture, one where autonomy is earned through shared understanding, not just granted by org charts.
This content is an excerpt from a recent InfoQ article by Lindsey Tibbitts, "Decentralized Architecture Needs More Than Autonomy".
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