Recap. Year one delivered a landing zone and a pilot partnership. Year two opens with a migration programme that has consumed the easy workloads — and a wave two list that violates every design assumption in the decisions document.
Series In Production · 1
Part of In Production. Browse the series overview for every part.
Outline
- Hook: The programme board adds three workloads nobody volunteered for in discovery week
- Context: Greenfield patterns vs. mainframe-adjacent, vendor-locked SaaS, single-human dependencies
- Tension: Platform is opinionated vs. platform must take this workload or the programme misses target
- What happened: (draft — expand with fakey.xyz wave-two onboarding)
- NZ field note: The meeting where platform said “not on the golden path” and programme said “then the target slips”
Sections to Draft
- Symptoms of wave two (identity models, data gravity, runtime exceptions)
- The BUILD / ROUTE / DECLINE framework under programme pressure
- Metric table: wave-one vs. wave-two time-to-environment
- Steal-this checklist
Next in the Series
Part 2 — “Showback Becomes Chargeback Becomes Politics.” Year one costs were centralised and nobody cared. Year two, finance wants attribution — and the first true platform bill lands on a business unit that did not ask for a landing zone.
One Block · build from here
List your wave-two workloads before the programme board does — and mark which design assumptions each one breaks.