What is a Technology Radar?
A Technology Radar (popularized by ThoughtWorks) is a visualization of the technologies, tools, platforms, and techniques relevant to your organization — sorted by how actively you should adopt them.
The four rings:
- Adopt: Technologies we’re confident in and actively recommend for use
- Trial: Technologies worth exploring in projects that can handle some risk
- Assess: Technologies worth researching to understand their implications
- Hold: Technologies to avoid or wind down — either too risky or being retired
Why companies need a tech radar
Without a tech radar (or equivalent), technology decisions get made ad hoc. Each team makes its own choices. Over time: heterogeneous infrastructure, inconsistent tooling, knowledge silos, and engineers who can’t move between teams without re-learning everything.
The radar creates alignment: a shared language for talking about technology choices.
Building your first radar
Step 1: Collect input
Survey your engineering leads. What technologies are they using? What are they curious about? What are they trying to phase out?
Step 2: Categorize
Group technologies into four quadrants (from ThoughtWorks):
- Techniques: Best practices, patterns, approaches
- Tools: Specific software tools
- Platforms: Infrastructure and platforms (cloud, databases, etc.)
- Languages & Frameworks: Programming languages and frameworks
Step 3: Place on rings
For each technology, the team votes on which ring it belongs in. Disagreements are discussions — the process is as valuable as the artifact.
Step 4: Publish and revisit
Publish the radar to the entire engineering organization. Revisit quarterly.
Using the radar in practice
The radar is most useful for:
- Onboarding: New engineers understand the technology context immediately
- Architecture reviews: When someone proposes a new technology, where does it sit on the radar?
- Vendor evaluations: Is this vendor building on Adopt-ring or Hold-ring technology?
- Hiring: Are candidates fluent in your Adopt-ring technologies?
Common mistakes
Too many items: A radar with 200 items is noise. Focus on the technologies that matter to your organization.
Never updated: A radar that’s two years old is worse than no radar — it gives false confidence. Quarterly reviews are the minimum.
No process for moving items: How does something move from Assess to Trial? From Trial to Adopt? Make the process explicit.