How to Write a Tech Adoption Review (with a Template)

Questions the review must answer

A good review starts with why now and what the change is for, not with the product name. If you cannot answer the three questions below in a sentence each, the review is not ready.

• If this change fails, how far does the damage spread?
• What gets worse if we wait another quarter?
• Which step cannot be undone?

Netflix shows what the first question looks like in practice. Its team built a tool to measure the blast radius of library changes, because a backward-compatible API can still change behavior across many services.

Mercari’s zero-downtime balance migration puts the second and third questions in front of the design: how long the old and new paths run side by side, and what keeps balances consistent during the move.

Candidates and alternatives

List alternatives by what other companies did with them, not by feature checklists. This site sorts cases into four approaches: adopted, migrated, removed, or only mentioned. Across the 24 posts collected so far, 8 are adoptions, 6 are migrations, 2 are removals, and 8 only mention a technology.

Removals matter as much as adoptions. Stripe replaced Envoy with its own data plane, a useful case when the question is whether an off-the-shelf component is worth keeping.

Decision matrix

Each cell should hold a number or a condition, not an adjective. A row for scale should say the traffic or data volume in units you can compare. Meta’s ingestion migration, for example, is framed around daily data volume rather than a general claim about size.

Useful rows: scale in your own units, operating cost, whether the team already runs the technology, and how expensive it is to reverse.

Using other companies as evidence

One case proves little. Look at the whole topic: in CI/CD, 4 of the 4 collected posts describe an adoption. That pattern is stronger evidence than any single post, but it still needs your own scale to mean anything.

Mark a case as weak when it only mentions a technology, or when it gives no scale. Mentions show what people are looking at, not what they put into production.

Risks and rollback plan

A rollback plan says what you will measure and when you will reverse. It does not just say “we can roll back.” For data moves, keep writes in both places for a defined period and compare results before cutting over. GitHub’s CSS migration is a smaller version of the same idea: remove a runtime dependency in stages instead of all at once.

Template (copy)

Copy this into the first file of your review. Do not make the decision while any section is still empty.

## 1. Questions the review must answer

- What problem are we solving?
- What breaks if we do not solve it this quarter?

## 2. Candidates and alternatives

| Candidate | Evidence from other companies | Approach | Where our setup differs |
|---|---|---|---|

## 3. Decision matrix

| Criterion | Weight | Candidate A | Candidate B | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|

## 4. Using other companies as evidence

- Record the scale of each case (traffic, data volume, team size).
- Mark cases that only mention a technology as weak evidence.

## 5. Risks and rollback plan

- Define the rollback trigger (metric and threshold) before the change.
- For data migrations, state the dual-write period and how you will verify it.