Four design decisions, and what each one costs.
Every architectural choice has a price. These are ours, and the price we pay for each.
Four design decisions, and what each one costs us
One record, resolved not merged
Identity is resolved across organisations. Nobody’s record is copied or renumbered because their organisation changed. The cost: reconciliation is a permanent engineering concern, not a one-off migration.
Configuration, not code
Jurisdictional behaviour is read from a governed, effective-dated record. The cost: a jurisdiction is not deployable until a named person has signed off its mandatory domains, which is slower than shipping a default.
Fail safe, never borrow
An unconfigured value resolves to nothing rather than to a neighbour’s. The cost: more visible gaps. The alternative is a silent wrong answer.
State the ceiling in the product
Where a capability has a limit, the API and the interface say so. The cost: our own marketing is harder to write. The benefit is that it survives technical due diligence.
What that adds up to
The fourth aim is the one most platforms make worse.
A platform you can leave is a platform you can trust to stay.