Infrastructure strategy
Frame the diagnosis, choose a policy, and turn it into coherent action.
Infrastructure leadership · 12-week curriculum
Practice the decisions that executives make.
A practicum for aspiring Heads of Infrastructure and VPs of Infrastructure. Build judgment through investment decisions, leadership challenges, and executive writing.
Read the first assignment ↓The learning path
Six tracks. One executive perspective.
Portfolio & capital allocation
Make investment decisions with explicit costs, tradeoffs, and assumptions.
Managing through leaders
Delegate outcomes, build accountability, and develop your directors.
Operating cadence
Make risk, reliability, and execution visible through a useful operating rhythm.
Executive communication
Write decision-oriented memos and align peers around a clear ask.
Developer productivity
Treat developer experience and platform adoption as measurable products.
Week 1 · Choosing what not to fund
Decision memo: fund 2 of 5 investments
You are the new Head of Infrastructure at fictional Northwind Commerce. Recommend exactly two investments within a $4.2M incremental annual budget. Write 800–1,400 words for the CTO and CFO: frame the problem, decline the other three options with reasons, show financial assumptions and sensitivity, and define milestones, leading indicators, and kill criteria.
Read case data and rubric
Northwind has 1,100 engineers and $2.1B in revenue. Cloud spend is $68M a year, growing 31% year over year while revenue grows 12%.
A. Kubernetes consolidation · $1.9M
14 clusters to 4 managed fleets; estimated 18% savings on $22M container spend, with two quarters of migration risk.
B. Build / CI acceleration · $1.4M
Median CI time from 38 to an estimated 14 minutes; 900 active developers.
C. Active-active checkout · $2.6M
Three regional incidents last year; approximately $4.8M estimated lost GMV.
D. FinOps & commitments · $0.9M
41% of current usage is on-demand; peers are at 15–20%.
E. Observability replacement · $1.6M
Current vendor costs $5.3M a year; renewal in nine months with a quoted 22% increase.
Assessment rubric
Problem framing 20 · Evidence 20 · Tradeoffs 25 · Financial reasoning 20 · Execution measurement 15.
Passing requires at least 85/100 overall and at least 70% on every criterion. Simulated evaluations never count toward mastery.
Cite at least two case figures and list key assumptions with low, medium, or high confidence. Use fictional or anonymized information; do not include confidential employer material.