As successful businesses grow, their identity and purpose become clearer.
They establish themselves in their market and develop deeper relationships with their customers.
However, there are many challenges that come with scaling up, and one common growing pain revolves around the tech stack. Just how can a business build and grow a tech stack that remains fit for purpose and continues to enable efficiency as it gets bigger?
In this article, I will outline the importance of choosing the right components for any tech stack, and explain why this becomes even more crucial for growing businesses that see increasing complexity in their processes as they scale.
Getting to grips with the tech stack
How a business’ tech stack is designed depends on the unique needs of that organisation, and to some degree on how the company has developed over the course of its existence. In many cases, the backbone will be a public cloud platform such as AWS or Microsoft Azure. These provide a solid foundation, with industry standard infrastructure and associate tooling with a usage-based cost model, allowing for the investment to be at a minimum, initially, as a service reaches maturity.
In a time when finding and retaining the right tech talent can be challenging, these industry-standard backends offer a significant advantage – companies can hire from a bigger talent pool, as more IT professionals will have the required skills and qualifications to work with these platforms. New recruits will need minimal onboarding, meaning less time is needed for learning and more time can be dedicated to innovation. And from the point of view of a potential hire, a company that has a flexible tech stack that’s ripe for building upon is an attractive proposition.
Leaders within the business must also recognise that technology is constantly evolving. The tech stack will not and cannot remain static. IT departments will need to experiment with and implement new technologies as time goes on, so nurturing an ethos of continual improvement is essential. While a business can have all the best-in-class tools, if they aren’t well integrated then the organisation won’t be able to drive efficiencies.
Choosing the right tools for the tech stack
There are many tools and SaaS offerings for businesses to choose from. Finding those that have the right functionality is crucial; for example, a finance team needs to cover all of its accounting, spend management, procurement, billing, payroll, and reporting activities. Depending on the specific use cases, the business may need to find different solutions for each individual process; though this may be challenging to implement.
The truth of the matter is that as businesses grow, workflows will become more complex and current solutions will need to be upgraded or swapped out entirely. Without a fundamental grasp of what these workflows are and how they have evolved, it will be all but impossible to build an effective tech stack. As an additional complication, they’ll need to connect new tools with other platforms used within the business such as ERP and CRM solutions.
And with new technologies emerging all the time, leaders need to see through the hype and strike a balance between innovation and stability. Continually changing and adding new tools is disruptive, so figuring out which ones are most compatible in the longer term – as well as the right time to initiate changes – is critical.
The role of the API
Even more importantly, choosing the right solutions should involve a detailed evaluation of the APIs that will facilitate the integration of these tools into the existing technology estate. APIs are the technical enablers that allow different software tools and platforms to be connected effectively. They offer the flexibility for engineers to adapt each tool to the unique workflows of the organisation, providing the basis to automate many processes that will help to drive efficiencies.
With a view to enabling automation, understanding the role the organisation’s data strategy plays in selecting tech is critical. The data-sharing and ingestion capabilities of each tool must be assessed, as this will be vital to enabling automation that will enhance the value of the businesses’ solution to customers.
CTOs should prioritise solutions that place a strong focus on developer usability and abstract complexity to facilitate efficiency and, ultimately, improve the experience for their own customers. Vendors that favour closed architecture over an open API approach could result in the organisation getting locked in, lacking the flexibility they need to switch to new tools as they grow. The best advice would be for businesses to interrogate the vendor’s API documentation and also talk to them to understand their product roadmap; this will help them to determine whether the tool is a good fit for their business or whether they should be looking elsewhere.
Takeaway: Balancing process, people and technology
While the tech stack is fundamentally important to the success of a business, it cannot be looked at in isolation. It’s vital to be fully confident not just in the stack as it stands but its flexibility and ability to evolve. This adaptability is crucial, especially in younger companies that will be developing in different directions.
At the heart of this success are the people within the business. While those in IT functions must have the skills and vision to build an efficient and effective tech stack that perfectly suits the workflows of the company, staff in all departments will also need to have working knowledge of newer tech such as generative AI and automation to perform effectively. The balance of process, people and technology will be the ultimate decider when it comes to hitting business goals, and all organisations must make sure they have the right foundations in place.
About the Author
Richard Rosenberg is Chief Product and Technology Officer at Spendesk. Spendesk is the complete spend management platform that saves businesses time and money by connecting company spend. With the integration of everyday technologies, built-in automation, and an easily adopted approval process, Spendesk’s single solution makes agile, efficient spending easy for employees and gives finance leaders complete visibility across the entire company spend. Trusted by thousands of companies, Spendesk is proud to have over 200,000 users across France, the UK, Germany and Spain.
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