If Everything Is Important, Nothing Is

👋 Hey there ,

The Firehose Trap

Ever walked into a system review and thought:

Before long, everything feels important.
So what happens?

• You overdesign low-risk parts.

• You treat all failures as equal.

• You slow down delivery because you’re scared to break anything.

This is the firehose trap: trying to design for everything at once.

Here’s how architects escape it and help their teams focus on what really matters.

🧭 The Mindset Shift

From: “Let’s make sure we cover everything”
To: “Let’s protect what matters most”

Your job as an architect isn’t to make everything perfect.

That means knowing:

• What’s on the critical path

• What has a large blast radius

• What’s hard to recover from

• What’s replaceable or low-cost

Not all downtime is equal.
Not all bugs are worth fixing.
And not all parts of the system need heroics.

This is strategic thinking, and it’s what earns you trust.

🔥 What Happens When You Don’t Prioritize

When everything is treated as critical:

• Teams suffer from alert fatigue

• Performance tuning wastes days for low-impact components

• Design discussions stall because no one can let go

• Incident reviews become finger-pointing sessions

And worst of all?

You spend your energy in the wrong places and miss what really matters.

🧰 Tool: The Critical Path & Blast Radius Map

Use this tool to guide your next system review, re-architecture, or incident postmortem.

Step 1: Map the Flow

Sketch the major components in your system:

• APIs

• Jobs

• Services

• Data stores

• External dependencies

Draw the data or user flow between them.

Step 2: Mark the Critical Path

Highlight the minimum viable flow:

• What must work for the system to deliver its core value?

• What’s used every time a user interacts?

This is your Core Path. Label it.

Step 3: Estimate Blast Radius

For each component, ask:

• If this fails, what breaks?

• Who’s affected (users, other services, business)?

• Can this be recovered automatically or manually?

Assign rough ratings:
🟢 Small impact
🟡 Medium impact
🔴 High impact

Step 4: Make 3 Lists

1. Protect at All Costs
   Components on the critical path with a high blast radius

2. Design to Fail Gracefully
   Off-path or 🔵 medium-impact services build fallbacks, retries, and alerts

3. Don’t Over-Invest
   🟢 Small blast radius + easy recovery = save your energy

This becomes your architecture prioritization plan.

📔 Example: The Broken Billing Job

I once worked with a team that spent two sprints improving retry logic on a daily billing job.

• 99.9% success rate

• No user-facing impact

• Easily re-runnable

Why the focus?
Because someone labeled it “critical” on a dashboard.

Meanwhile, the login service, used by every user, every day, had no rate limits and was vulnerable to denial-of-service issues.

No one noticed. Until it broke.

That’s what happens when you don’t clarify what’s actually important.

💡 What Architects Do Differently

1. Push for Clarity, Not Coverage

Instead of asking “what could go wrong?” ask:

This helps teams move out of fear mode and into prioritization.

2. Normalize Acceptable Failure

Great architects say things like:

• “It’s okay if this fails occasionally.”

• “We’ll delay processing, not block users.”

• “Let’s alert on user pain, not every exception.”

3. Design Guardrails for the Core Path

• Rate limits

• Circuit breakers

• Idempotency

• Fallbacks

• Fast recovery plans

You don’t need that everywhere, just where it counts.

✅ Mini Challenge: Audit Your System for Risk Focus

This week, pick one area of your system, maybe a service or user journey.

Ask:

• What’s the real critical path?

• What has a big blast radius but no protection?

• What are we over-engineering for low risk?

Then propose one simplification or one safety net, based on actual priority.

That’s what architects do:
Turn complexity into clarity.

🎯 Want Tools Like This Every Week?

The best architects don’t know everything.
They focus on what matters most.

If you haven’t joined the free crash course yet, it’s packed with:

• Tradeoff thinking

• Communication tools

• Real-world design strategies

• Worksheets like this one

👉 Join the 5-Day Crash Course Now »

👋 Wrapping Up

Great architecture isn’t about protecting everything.
It’s about protecting the right things.

When everything is important, nothing gets the focus it deserves.
So start making decisions like this:

• What’s fragile and essential? Guard it.

• What’s important but recoverable? Make it flexible.

• What’s noisy but safe? Let it go.

That’s clarity. That’s leadership.
That’s architecture.

Thanks for reading.

See you next week,
Bogdan Colța
Tech Architect Insights