Technology stacks combine technology products and services that work together to create or complete an application, project, or task.
Not all products work universally with other products.
For example, your iPhone or Android device. You can’t use just any cable to connect or charge your device: you have to use specific cables compatible with the product.
Or imagine a wonderful goulash of your favorite foods. Even if you like graham crackers, relish, burgers, and cotton candy, that doesn’t necessarily mean they taste good (or even are edible) when combined.
These same concepts apply to your technology stack.
If you don’t think about your tech stack now, you may end up serving your team a plate of spaghetti, honey, and sprinkles in the future. Disgusting.
Sorry, friend.
If you’ve never heard of a tech stack, don’t panic. This article will guide you through everything you need to know, from understanding a technology stack to building your own.
Technology stacks combine technology products and services that work together to create or complete an application, project, or task.
The Facebook app, for example, is built with a combination of frameworks and coding languages, including JavaScript, PHP, HTML, CSS, and ReactJS.
Or consider a marketing team’s tech stack, which might include WordPress, Instapage, Twilio, Google Analytics, Ahrefs, and Sprout Social.
These frameworks, languages, and applications work seamlessly together to create a technology stack. The term “tech stack” originated in the software development community, but has evolved to include marketing services (MarTech stacks), sales services (Sales stacks), financial services (Fintech stacks), and more.
However, not all technology stacks are created equal. Some require intensive integrations, APIs (application programming interface), and ongoing maintenance, while others refuse to share data with each other.
Whether you are a software company or an e-commerce business, you are going to have a technology stack that is unique to your business. However, we want to help you avoid accidentally building a technology stack without intention or purpose.
That’s why you need to plan your technology stack now.
You can’t choose software products and services in isolation. As you scale, these tools will have to work together, and you don’t want to end up with an inedible ice cream meatloaf.
Here’s how planning a tech stack now can help you avoid headaches later:
Maintain workflows: Adopting new software solutions can be time-consuming. Team members have to sit in and adapt, and efficiency takes time to develop. Choosing the right technology stack from the beginning can help avoid unnecessary changes in the future.
Save your budget: It’s not cheap to restructure your technology stack. This can include rebuilding applications, reworking processes, and even hiring new employees with special skills. All of this requires time and money.
Support innovation and scale: Budget and staffing constraints may slow down your business from time to time, but you don’t want your technology stack to be the main reason for not implementing a new idea or strategy. Ensure your technology stack fosters innovation rather than stifles it.
6 Things to Do When Building Your Tech Stack
Each company has its own technology stack. For example, one may use PHP and Laravel to build their web application while hosting the site on WordPress, while another may use Python and Django to build a website on Wagtail.
Your technology stack may be completely different from your partner’s or a competitor’s, and that’s okay. Don’t be afraid to talk to other founders or leaders to learn about their tech stack. You may learn what to include and what not to include on your own, or discover pain points with specific apps, such as lack of customer support, available talent, or bug issues.
As long as you follow the tips below, you will have a technology stack that works efficiently for your business in the short and long term.
Technology solutions solve immediate problems, but each of them should be considered alongside the rest of your current and future technology stack.
Consider scalability from the beginning. Will a current coding language or eCommerce platform support your business a year from now? And in 5 years? 10? If you don’t consider scalability from the start, you’ll likely have to add additional tools or modify your technology stack in the future, which is often time-consuming and expensive.
Talk to your team before making any decisions. Your lead developer or marketing manager will likely know the ins and outs of their industries, which will help point you in the right direction and avoid costly mistakes.
For example, if you want to add email to your MarTech stack, you might consider what other channels you plan to add in the future. If you’re only going to need email, a service like MailChimp will probably be adequate. However, if you plan to add voice, SMS, chat, WhatsApp messaging, and a contact center, you’ll be better off jumping into a platform like Twilio from the start.
Remember that it is not impossible to change your battery mid-project. If you discover inefficiencies and have to pivot later, it is possible, expensive but possible. Do your best to plan your tech stack now to avoid unpleasant surprises later.
However, ambitious planning for the future can backfire. Anticipating exponential growth may lead you to choose more expensive software solutions that you may never take advantage of. These decisions could lead you to burn money too quickly, and you could go under before achieving broader market adoption.
This leads us perfectly to our second tip: creating MVPs.
MVP stands for Minimum Viable Product, and is a development technique that focuses on creating a product or service with basic, affordable features while still exciting customers.
Think about Facebook 12 years ago: it’s a far cry from what it looks like today, but it was able to generate enough buzz and interest to justify (and afford) spending millions of dollars to invest in additional features and functionality.
Before you throw your entire savings account into building an expensive e-commerce store that integrates with your huge inventory and Instagram account, test your idea on a smaller scale.
Instead, consider launching a landing page featuring your products (before you build them) to gauge your market’s appetite. If they want what you offer, you will know that your idea is worth investing in. If the desire isn’t there yet, you’ll know you’ll need to iterate on your product or message before scaling.
The technology can be expensive. How can you build and test an MVP without draining your bank account? With open source.
Consider open source software as the ever-benevolent philanthropist of developers.
Open source tools are free and available to everyone. Thousands of developers contribute millions of hours to the open source community, giving your company free access to use, copy, modify, share and build on existing code and applications.
For example, the popular MEAN technology stack. This stack includes MongoDB, Express.js, AngularJS, and Node.js, all of which are open source and free to use.
Before purchasing an expensive software license, look for an open source solution. You may find an existing open source application that meets your needs. It may not offer the scale and support you need in the long term, but it can help you launch and test an MVP on a budget.
Budgets and technology stacks are two intertwined conversations you should have when planning for the future. Whether you rely primarily on open source applications or invest in long-term growth, you’ll need to have your financial statements by your side as you plan for the future.
Can you afford to invest in the technology stacks you want to launch your product or service? What revenue margins will you have to achieve to be profitable? How will the scale affect your expenses in the future? Can it raise prices to adapt?
You will also want to calculate the cost of ongoing maintenance and upkeep. Security protocols will need to be updated, bugs fixed, and code rewritten to improve stability. All of these tasks require valuable resources and bandwidth.
Although developers may be primarily responsible for creating and planning technology stacks, make sure your financial planners and accountants are also part of the conversation. They’ll help you keep the conversation realistic and affordable, so you don’t run into cash flow or profitability problems later.
Building certain types of technology stacks requires different levels of experience. For example, while you may find thousands of Python developers available to build your application, you may only have a handful of Ruby on Rail developers to choose from.
A technology stack can offer your application greater scalability and functionality, but it can limit your market for talent. Consider what your current team already knows and what they are comfortable learning.
Adopting new technologies with difficult learning curves could slow progress and even bring projects to a standstill. If necessary, you will need to think about training your current team on the job or hiring an expert to handle that aspect of the technology implementation.
This is true even from a marketing or sales perspective. If you want to add a deeper layer of analytics to your content marketing, you might consider high-end apps like Heap or Kissmetrics.
However, these tools don’t come with an easy learning curve or instruction manual: you’ll need to train your salespeople on these new platforms or hire candidates with that specific skill.
In the end, you may decide that less functional software is worth it for the ease of use and gentler learning curves. However, that decision is ultimately up to you.
Beyond thinking about your team, budget constraints, and scalability, think about your end users, the customers.
For example, while Squarespace may be easier for your marketing team to build a website on, it might not provide the features and integrations that your customers would like. In that case, despite the skills of your team, you may decide that WordPress is a more customer-oriented and scalable option.
This point supports the purpose of building an MVP. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how feature-rich or profitable your product or app is if it doesn’t meet customer demand.
Put the customer first, and then work backwards. Use analytics to track users and understand their experiences. Survey and interview potential customers to understand their desires: This information could dramatically change the direction of your product and evolve the needs of your technology stack.
