Judging by the beginning of the title you will think that we are about to talk about electric batteries or object batteries. We like the second option and we give you the first preview: a technological stack becomes the starter pack of software that every company needs to guarantee sustained growth with a future project in mind.

It is enough to select the appropriate objects so that once established in this technological stack, they do not prevent the commercial horizons of a company from being curtailed due to lack of computer tools that were not there from the beginning. That is why it is important to know the scalability capacity that can and is intended to be achieved.

The definition of a technological stack implies prior work on strategic analysis because the choice of software products that will shape it are the tools that will work in a systemic and integrated way as the business grows in number of consumers. So this selection should in no way be taken into account in isolation.

Tech stack…what is it?

Stacks in the computing world refer to a collection of programs that work together to provide specific functionality. For example, a web development stack may include an operating system, a web server, a programming language, and a database.

Hand in hand with this, one of its greatest benefits has to do with its ability to adapt to requirements. If we are dealing with a project related to the marketing area, we have a MarTech stack. If we are in charge of a project on finance, we have a FinTech stack. As each stack has a compendium of technologies, they all provide a standardized set of tools to launch whatever the application, providing the benefit of reducing the amount of time and effort in development.

They are commonly used by organizations to develop internal applications and to offer services to customers. For example, a company can use a web development stack to develop an e-commerce, while a hospital can use a mobile development stack to create a mobile application for patients.

In fact, a clear example that we can provide from Lab9 regarding technological stacks is our work carried out for “Sharyco”, a corporate application that had the support of at least four developers and a mobile development stack.

How to properly build a technology stack

While there are no precise rules about what can or cannot guarantee the technological success of your organization, these recommendations can serve as a guide to diagram your scalability stack in the best possible way. Next:

1. Plan for the future: it is true that technological solutions solve immediate problems, but each of them must be in the focus of analysis along with the rest of your technological stack, otherwise the readjustment will probably be very costly.

For example, if you plan to add email to your MarTech stack, you should consider what other channels would be useful in the future. If you plan to add a chatbot or messaging via WhatsApp, you'd better jump on a platform like Twilio from the start.

2. Create a Minimum Viable Product (MVP): this is a development technique that focuses on the creation of a product or service with basic but easily salable characteristics. This leads to the recommendation that before making a large investment it is very advisable to test the project on a smaller scale. This way you can easily monitor market needs.

3. Take advantage of open source technology: Open source tools are free and freely available, giving your company free access to use, copy, modify, share and build on existing code and applications.

For example, we can cite the popular MEAN technology stack, which includes MongoDB, Express.js, AngularJS and Nodejs, all of which are open source and free.

4. Create budgets: budgets and technology stacks are two essential topics when diagramming your technology stack. You will always need to have the numerical state to start thinking about your future project. Questions like “what revenue margins will my MVP have to reach to be profitable?” or “how will the scale affect your expenses in the future?” should not be missing from your check list.

5. Consider team experience: building certain types of technology stacks requires different levels of experience. In fact, adopting new technologies can even slow down or paralyze progress if you do not have an expert team. To avoid this you should think about training your collaborators or hiring a specialist.

The user as the protagonist: nothing better than knowing your client's pain points to come up with an idea that knows how to satisfy each and every one of their needs. Research, analysis and establishment of parameters are the essential ingredients for a project to have a budget in line with the scalability of the technological stack being pursued.