This type of document is out of date almost as soon as it’s created. I would have someone on your data team be responsible for reviewing it quarterly to ensure that it’s up to date. 

I waited far too long to create the initial version of this and I think it was a disservice to the data team as a whole in terms of understanding all of our tools, our data, and the way in which the data flows through the system.

The traffic sources is something that probably doesn’t merit being included most of the time, but Reforge’s marketing is fairly simple and it makes sense for us to add it, especially at the time it was created.

It’s easy to create these documents in a tool like Miro. I don’t have variations in this example, but you could easily create and keep up-to-date various versions with different levels of granularity.

I’d rather create a simple visualization that gets the key points across than aim to create a single visualization that communicates a million things. 

Some of these other points are likely best suited for text based documentation that’s suited for tables and easier to update.

I was pleasantly surprised at the reception for this post on LinkedIn. Tons of people liked it, commented on it, and tagged other people as examples of how to recruit people using assets like this, partly because I don’t think it was common as of when I posted it (Q3 2022). 

It got over 20,000 impressions on LinkedIn and caused a huge spike in applications to our open Senior Data Engineer position.

Andrew Wilson

Dan Wolchonok

A diagram that shows the tools that Reforge uses, the categories the tools fall into, how they interact with one another, and the flow of data between them.

This is a high-level overview of our systems and the paths that data takes between them. 

There are many potential versions of this

 (from very high-level categories of tools to very specific details about the volume of data, what is included, and how frequently it is sent).

It visualizes many different elements of Reforge’s infrastructure:

The marketing channels that drive traffic to our web properties (marketing website, production web app)

How data is moved from first-party systems to our data warehouse and customer data platform

The technical tools we use to collect, transform, process, analyze, and report on data

Explain the transformations we do to make our data easy to report on

Identify which departments are responsible for which systems

The agreements we have in place with various functions about these data sources and how to rely on them (engineering, marketing, finance)

Identify who is responsible for purchasing, contracts, and maintenance of each of the systems

Usually, these types of diagrams are just for internal documentation.

In recruiting prospective employees to Reforge

In new hire onboarding documentation for new hires to understand our tools

For existing hires to understand how various tools work together and downstream implications of any potential changes to our system

The original justification was to create interest in roles we were looking to hire for, but in creating the diagram it became clear that it was long overdue for internal documentation.

Data infrastructure diagram for Reforge

Data Infrastructure Diagram

What’s in this diagram

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