I have been deep in compliance work this week, and it got me thinking about a chapter from Eben Hewitt’s Technology Strategy Patterns. The chapter covers three things that look boring on paper but quietly determine whether your strategy lands: the RACI, the company life cycle, and the value chain.

The RACI is the one I keep coming back to, because it is the cheapest way to kill confusion on any project.

RACI is not busy work

RACI stands for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed. You list the work down the left, list the people across the top, and drop an R, A, C, or I in each cell.

The trap is accountability. For every work item, exactly one person is accountable. Not two, not three. I have watched teams assign multiple accountable parties because it feels democratic, and it always ends the same way: nobody owns the outcome, and the executive has no single leader to go to.

If two people genuinely seem right for the accountable role, that is usually a sign the task is not defined properly. Split it or recast it. And if you still cannot choose, pick the person with the most control or the most vested interest.

The consulted role matters more than people give it credit for. The right Cs are the difference between a robust product and something tepid. If you are building software, your CISO’s office should probably be in that column.

Know what stage your company is in

Companies have a life cycle, and your technology strategy should shift with it. Hewitt’s guide is rough but useful:

  • Mature (5-8% growth): the market may be saturated, so the strategy often shifts to platforms, stickiness, or quick-win add-ons.
  • Strong growth (8-15%): expect a pivot and a fluid, volatile period. Focus on agility in the system, like microservices and better development practices.
  • Growth mode (20%+): get to market fast and strengthen the core.
  • Decline (0-5% or falling): repurpose what you can and focus on cutting costs, while still aiming at top-line revenue.

The uncomfortable part is the decline spiral. Negative growth forces cost cuts, which starve innovation, which loses more customers. Knowing your stage tells you how much work it will take to get anything done.

For a private company, the data is harder to come by. Ask executives for revenue numbers relative to recent years and let them characterize it.

Growth is not a law

One idea in this chapter stuck with me. Companies are not required to grow beyond a self-sustaining size. Some of the oldest businesses on earth are small, and most of them have fewer than 300 employees. Growth for growth’s sake pushes companies into markets they do not understand, chasing customers they do not understand.

That does not mean growth is bad. It means growth should be sustainable, not reflexive.

The value chain

Porter’s value chain divides a company into discrete activities: inbound logistics, operations, outbound logistics, marketing and sales, and service. The point is to see where value is created and where it is not. As a technologist, if you look at your architecture through this lens, you start finding places where you can deliver more value for less cost.

A RACI takes minutes to build and you refine it all project long. It answers who is doing what and who is accountable, which is a lot of clarity for very little investment. If you are about to skip it because it feels like paperwork, reconsider. It is one of the cheapest ways to make a project go well.