Overview
The radar categorizes technologies into four concentric rings. Each ring represents a specific level of recommended usage and organizational risk tolerance. The rings are not a judgment of a technology's quality in the abstract — they are a statement about your organization's readiness to support that technology at scale.
1. Adopt (The Center)
- Meaning: "This is our default."
- Usage: Use this for all new production projects. The organization has deep expertise, mature tooling, and dedicated support for technologies in this ring.
- Platform commitment: The Platform Engineering team builds Golden Path templates, CI/CD pipelines, and observability dashboards for Adopt-ring technologies. Choosing an Adopt technology is the path of least resistance.
- Example: Java 17, React, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes.
2. Trial (The Edge of Production)
- Meaning: "Worth pursuing — with eyes open."
- Usage: We want to use this, but haven't proven it at scale in our environment yet. Use it for one low-risk pilot project that can tolerate some instability. The team using it must accept reduced platform support.
- Goal: Generate enough real-world evidence to decide: does this move to Adopt, or back to Hold?
- Example: Go (if the org is primarily Java), Svelte, Temporal for workflow orchestration.
3. Assess (The Lab)
- Meaning: "Worth exploring — not for customers yet."
- Usage: Use for hackathons, internal prototypes, or time-boxed technical spikes. Do not use in production. The goal is to understand whether the technology solves a real problem you have, before committing any resources to it.
- Example: Rust (for a Python shop evaluating performance-critical services), a new vector database for an AI feature, WebAssembly for edge compute.
4. Hold (The Stop Sign)
- Meaning: "Proceed with caution — stop starting new things here."
- Usage: Hold has two distinct sub-cases that are worth distinguishing:
- Legacy/Deprecated: The technology is in production but losing support or being phased out (e.g., AngularJS, Java 8, Python 2). Stop all new adoption; plan migration.
- Too Immature/Risky: The technology is new but has unresolved stability, security, or support concerns (e.g., a v0.1 framework with no production track record). Wait for it to mature before evaluating further.
A critical nuance: Hold does not mean "delete it." It means "don't start new projects with it." Existing systems using a Hold technology continue to run — they just go on a migration backlog.
A common interview trap: "What's the difference between Assess and Trial?" Many candidates conflate them. The key distinction is production traffic. Assess means zero production usage — it's purely exploratory. Trial means limited, controlled production usage on a low-risk workload, with the explicit goal of generating evidence for a promotion or demotion decision. Assess answers "could this work for us?" Trial answers "does this work for us?"