IcePanel - Explain complex software systems

Thanks @mwseibel for hunting us! Hey Product Hunt! I’m Victor, maker of 🧊IcePanel, with fellow maker @jacob_shadbolt. 🙋 The problem In our previous roles, dev teams were usually misaligned about how our services worked and about tech decisions made. Teams regularly wasted a bunch of hours explaining how our systems worked, usually with unclear diagrams 💩. People used out-of-date diagrams in key decision-making, requiring costly rework and refactoring when things didn’t go as expected. Turns out this isn’t uncommon... 🧊 What is IcePanel IcePanel takes a collaborative approach to software architecture diagramming, using a model as the source of truth. This allows objects and relationships to be reused and keeps all your diagrams in sync. We made it easy for architects and engineers to contribute their knowledge and decisions to IcePanel, so they can easily align technical and non-technical team members. 🙏 Our ask to you Try out IcePanel and we’d love to hear your feedback. You can sign up for free or start a free trial for the paid features. We’ll be around all day to answer questions. Stay chill! 🥶

Looks really good! Just wondering what the benefits are of the C4 model? Why C4 over another? Congrats on the launch!

Love your youtube channel! i was going to ask what is “c4” but then saw a video about it. Beautiful website too and killer product. wish we had this at my old company.

Congrats on the launch 🎉

Wow, this is awesome — congrats on the launch guys! This is MUCH better than trying to explain out all the details of our systems in a Google doc that inevitably falls out of date within a week...

We've been using IcePanel for almost a year now. It was foundational in communicating our move from a distributed monolith (which had never been diagramed before) to a properly distributed event driven serverless architecture. It has become a tool that the engineering teams use to keep us all in sync with a good mental model of our somewhat complex and evolving set of services and messages. The rate of evolution and improvement of the product over this last year has been remarkable. Victor and Jacob's vision and ability to translate the C4 model into one of the most powerful modeling/diagramming tool I've seen is remarkable. It's rare to see a small team be able to have such a cohesive view and execute so beautifully with a sophisticated UI implementation. I look forward to IcePanel becoming a core tool for modeling and communicating about complex systems.

I've used IcePanel - it's good to see it on ProductHunt! It's a great tool and the team ship feature FAST. Keep up the good work folks

Congrats on the launch, this is amazing guys! Really love the product, the design is beautiful and intuitive. This is going to make cross-team collaboration and understanding of the underlying systems so much easier.

Getting architecture represented visually is always hard in my experience. In an engineering/product team, who tends to be the producer of the IcePanel diagram and who is the consumer? Curious about PMs vs Engineers specifically.