Software architecture is always about making tradeoffs!
Every choice you'll make will come with preconditions to success as well as side effects.
So does the choice for orienting your architecture around business capabilities.
Tradeoffs of using business capabilities
It takes time
In order to be able to leverage business capabilities, you will first need to learn which capabilities the business has. As every business is positioning itself uniquely in the marketplace these capabilities will also be unique (to some extend) and it may take months to figure that out.
Willingness to align
The delivery team must be willing to embrace business concepts and not just focus on technical details alone. At the same time the business must be willing to share with the delivery team how the organization works, which is also not always a given.
Awareness of language mismatch
Even when this willingness is there, both groups need to be aware that they don't have alignement in jargon and language. They must be actively working to come to a ubiqitous language and mutual understanding.
Organizational maturity
The organization itself needs to be mature and stable enough. In a startup which pivots every year, the capabilities will be shifting all the time and won't be stable enough to build upon.
Need for a discovery process
There is little more wasteful then building the wrong capability in the right way. The organization needs to have a process in place to decide which capability needs to be built next, in alignment with both market needs and organizational priorities.
Technical maturity
Especially the act of packaging capabilities and then composing them again will have profound impact at a technical level. Your delivery team will need sufficient technical maturity to deal with the implications it has on for example the testing strategy, on user experience consistency, on backward compatibility, and so forth...
Relapse into noun thinking is inevitable
We've all been conditioned since high school or college to think in nouns, it is inevitable (even for me) to relapse into noun thinking from time to time. You'll need to be wary of this, accept it, but try to shift your attention back.
It's about the journey not the destination
Please take your time to assess the readiness of both your teams and your organization, not everything needs to be in place to get started, but certain aspects do need to be present.
It's perfectly fine to say you're not ready to adopt business capabilities yet, and first focus on improving the discovery and delivery processes in your organization.
And when you choose to embark on the journey, be prepared to hit some bumps in the road, even knowing you may never reach the final destination (there is always room to improve).
So, blue architecture or red architecture: which will you choose?
