Lenses & 5 Rings
One Diagram. Eleven Ways to Read It.
Switch a lens and the same stack is colored by PII handling, consent, ownership, cost, lifecycle stage or pace layer, or its connections by integration mode and authentication method. Scott Brinker’s 5 Rings and Software Palette sit on every tool as classification fields.
Eleven lenses, one click each
Each lens answers one question about the stack. Here they are grouped by who usually asks it.
Architecture
The default platform view, where each tool sits in its adoption lifecycle (evaluating, active, sunsetting), and Gartner’s pace layers: systems of record, differentiation and innovation.
Lenses: Platform, Lifecycle, Strata
Data & Privacy
How each tool handles personal data — stores it, passes it through, hashes, encrypts or drops it — and which tools need consent before they receive it.
Lenses: PII Data, Consent
Operations
Which team owns each tool, what it costs per month, and how much of it is used — seats used against seats bought.
Lenses: Owner, Cost, Utilization
Integrations
Connections colored by integration mode (batch, real-time, streaming, hybrid) or by authentication method, and a Meta lens that shows which tools are too thinly documented to judge.
Lenses: Data Flow, Security, Meta
Platform and Owner are free. The other lenses need Pro or above.
The 5 Rings of Capability
Brinker’s model places each Martech tool in one of five rings, from the data at the centre to the apps and agents at the edge. In Stack Builder the ring is a field on every tool — in the hover card, the properties panel and the metadata table — next to its Software Palette type.
Data Core
Warehouses, storage, event streaming
Semantic Layer
Identity, data modeling, governance, consent
Capabilities as a Service
CDPs, reverse ETL, event routing
Decisioning
Analytics, AI/ML, decisioning
Apps & Agents
Engagement, activation, personalization
The ring is editable per tool. The suggested ring comes from the vendor’s record in our knowledge base where there is one, and otherwise from its category.
Suggestions you accept or reject
The lenses are only as good as the fields behind them, so Stack Builder suggests values for six of them. It only suggests a field you have not filled in yourself.
- · PII handling
- · Whether consent is required
- · Ring placement
- · Software Palette type
- · System of truth or context
- · Execution context: client-side, server-side, hybrid or SaaS
Every suggestion stays pending in the metadata table, with its reason, until you accept or reject it.
The method
Classify your stack by hand
The same stack answers different questions depending on how you sort it. This procedure runs one stack through several sorts and looks at what each one exposes. An hour per lens.
-
Sort by who the tool serves
Customer-facing or internal-only. The ratio tells you whether your stack is built for the customer or for reporting on them.
-
Sort by architectural layer
Collection, storage, decisioning, activation, measurement. A layer with one tool is a single point of failure; a layer with five is a consolidation candidate.
-
Sort by how recently it was chosen
Group by the year each tool was selected. Clusters show you which strategy each part of the stack was built for — and whether that strategy is still current.
-
Note what changes between sorts
A tool that looks central in one sort and peripheral in another is worth a closer look. That disagreement is the point of running more than one.
Travel brand, 21 tools, sorted three ways.
| Customer-facing / internal | 8 / 13 |
|---|---|
| Decisioning layer | 1 tool |
| Activation layer | 6 tools |
| Chosen pre-2023 | 9 tools |
| Central in one sort only | 4 tools |
Reading it: One decisioning tool against six activation tools is a bottleneck you cannot see in a flat inventory. Nine pre-2023 choices means nearly half the stack was picked for a strategy that has since changed.
The shortcut: The builder's lenses (Platform, Ownership, Lifecycle, Strata and others) re-paint the same diagram in one click, so comparing sorts costs nothing.
The argument behind this
The composable canvas and the cosmos
On why how you frame a stack changes what you notice in it.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are lenses?
What happened to Perspectives?
What are the 5 Rings of Capability?
Are the suggestions made by AI?
Which plans include the lenses?
Where can I read more about the Brinker model?
Which system am I looking at?
Four things on this site have names. Here is the whole map.
- Rings
- classify what a tool is. Five of them, after Scott Brinker’s 5 Rings: Data Core, Semantic Layer, CaaS, Decisioning, Apps & Agents. Recorded on each tool.
- Lenses
- choose what you are looking at. Eleven ways to colour the same canvas — platform, PII, consent, owner, cost, lifecycle, pace layer, utilization, integration mode, auth method and documentation. They change what you see; they do not score anything.
- Checks
- score how well the stack performs. 6 engine checks that produce the A–F grade. This is the only one of the four that puts a number on your stack.
- Stack DNA
- is the evidence the checks are scored from. Computed connectivity metrics, redundancy groups and composite health values. You rarely read it directly — it is what the grade is built on.
One more grade, unrelated to these. The free instant audit also returns an A–F letter, but it grades one thing only — how much of your stack is duplicated. It is not a short version of the 6-check evaluation, and the two letters will not match.
Looking for the grades? See what the evaluation computes.
Stop fighting your own diagram
One click switches the canvas from the architect’s view to the DPO’s to the ops team’s. The data doesn’t change. The questions do.
No credit card required. Free plan available.