Armed with my conclusions about the existing systems, teams, and bottlenecks, and having imagined the places where we could make things more efficient, expand features, or improve the business, I used the data to come up with a rough idea for a possible future. I spent some time sitting alone in a room with a whiteboard or paper and drawing out the systems in place at our company, slicing and dicing the systems and teams across various common attributes. For example, I looked at systems that were customer-facing versus systems that were internal operations–facing (such as warehouse and customer service tools); I looked at backend versus frontend. Because our technology had to model most of the business data to operate, I realized I had a unique insight into the way that data flowed and changed, and possible axes for evolution.