A proposed list of tools, methods and processes for an early-stage startup, from brainstorming and customer discovery to shipping, selling and running the team. Each has a ring assignment: Adopt, Trial, Assess or Hold, plus the company stage it fits best. Select a blip or a row to read the rationale. Evidence, owners and history are illustrative examples, not data from a real company.
Built by Teodor Maior as a starting point for founders and early teams. To use it, copy the list, re-rate every entry for your own team in a one-hour session, and revisit it each quarter.
Distance from the centre shows confidence: the closer to the middle, the more strongly it is recommended. Colour shows the ring, the shape shows how the entry moved since the last edition, and the number links to the register below. This is the first public edition, so the movement markers show example history to illustrate how a radar changes over time.
Each ring is a recommendation with a defined risk level, how much we commit to it, and how to use it. The entry criteria are what the review group checks before it places a technology in that ring.
A technology moves only when this evidence exists. If there is no agreement, the entry stays in, or drops to, the more cautious ring. Moves are cheap at our size, so revisit often.
| Move | Evidence required | Decided by |
|---|---|---|
| New entry | Normally starts in Assess, with a champion, the problem it might solve, and an experiment of two weeks or less with a clear success signal. It can enter Trial or Adopt directly when real evidence already exists, or Hold when it is a known anti-pattern. | Weekly team meeting |
| Assess → Trial | The experiment met its success signal, and a real initiative (launch, sprint, sales push) agrees to use it. | Founders + initiative owner |
| Trial → Adopt | Used for three or more cycles with visible results, at least two people can teach it, the cost fits the runway, and it is added to onboarding. | Founders, at the quarterly review |
| Any → Hold | A better option is in Adopt or Trial, it is too slow or costly for our stage, or it was tried and did not work. | Founders |
| Hold → Dropped | Nobody uses it any more and the subscription is cancelled. The entry leaves the radar and stays in the decision log. | Operations |
| Stage change | After a funding round or a big change in team size, every Adopt entry is checked again. What fits ten people may not fit forty. | Founders |
The full list by quadrant and ring. Quadrants group technologies by kind; rings show how confident we are in them.
Anyone adds a tool or method they want to try, or a complaint about one we use, to the radar page in the wiki.
New entries get a two-week experiment with a champion and a success signal.
A one-hour quarterly session goes through new entries and proposed moves against the movement rules.
Each change gets one paragraph in the decision log: what moved, why, and who owns it.
Adopt entries go into the onboarding checklist. Hold entries are cancelled at the next renewal.