Optimizing Your Tech Stack for Scaling

When the time comes to scale, your tech stack is something that will probably not require too much of an overhaul. If you put it together carefully, the chances are really good that your tech stack is humming along nicely, serving your company’s needs and helping you to serve your customers seamlessly.

However, this might not be the case once you have successfully scaled, especially if your scaling is going to result in a large jump in your business activity. There are two key areas here that require your immediate attention:

Upgrades: Today, your company might be well served with the current subscription levels for each of the core components of your tech stack. Will that be the case tomorrow? A large jump in business activity means that there will be internal and external ramifications. From needing additional people to serve your customers to added tools and capabilities for handling them, it is quite possible that some or all elements of your tech stack will need to be upgraded.

Internal Additions: Scaling effectively is not just about growth but about improving your efficiency and finding ways to cut the fat. One area that you can focus on improvements is streamlining internal operations. While paper was an important means of documentation in the 20th century, going paperless is the way to go. Consider taking current forms and finding a way to digitize them. This way, very little will fall through the cracks, the material can be viewed by anyone anywhere, and processes can be substantially streamlined. I developed quite a few internal apps at one place that I worked, and the results meant that records could be processed in the matter of minutes regardless of where the technicians might be, (assuming that their data plans were working; of course, as soon as they came into a service area, that information would then be submitted accordingly.)

Once you have done all of this work in determining what needs to be done here, the next step is the most crucial: how should training look for employees? This can be a bit tricky, especially when employees see something that they think is the optimal way to do it (even though it isn’t). Every once in a while, this does happen, but usually, the end result is a question about why things are not working properly.

Therefore, develop a plan for giving thorough training on everything. This will likely not be a one time situation, since there is a good chance that this will need to become a part of the new employee onboarding process. Therefore, as you are preparing the material for the current employee training, also be thinking in terms of how this material needs to be best incorporated with your current onboarding process.

There will likely need to be some tweaks with the process. Therefore, plan on a review period to assess everything. If things do not go according to plan, then meet, review, and decide how best to change things. This is crucial, since you need everything to be in place in order to scale properly. View your tech stack as the foundation upon which you will put a building. You need to make sure it can support everything. Also, since time is money, make sure you get all of this figured out quickly so that you can immediately get to work building. 

In conclusion, when the time comes to scale, you likely will not have to do a lot of work to improve your existing tech stack. Most likely, you will not need to do too much. However, you will likely need to upgrade some elements to take into account the growth that will likely take place. Additionally, you should spend time assessing your current internal operations, especially focusing on the paper trail. If it is not digitized, the time has come to go completely digital here.