In an ideal world, a start-up’s path is a series of accretive iterations — nimble, well-timed tacks pushing the business steadily forward through competitive headwinds.
The reality is more often a scramble — a rush to launch, to find its market, to satisfy initial adopters, to scale. Each change in direction or priority, leaves scars on the firm’s code base and infrastructure, progressively sapping its ability to adapt, grow and compete.
Without the right design choices and operational disciplines, application and infrastructure can quickly come to resemble the very antithesis of agility and velocity: ossified, costly to operate, unscalable, unreliable or insecure.
Unsurprisingly, the relative opacity of engineering can be a concern for investors of early-stage companies in particular.
Despite the promise of rapid, easy application creation offered by modern development practices and cloud platforms, there are many ways in which a firm’s application technology can take a wrong turn. For example:
For investors from a non-technical background, it doesn’t have to be a matter of crossed fingers or “gut feel”. Signs of distress can be spotted if you know what to look for. Here are six areas to explore:
Launching into new regions requires weeks rather than days or even hours of engineering effort.
Novel cloud technologies or services are employed without critical consideration of business impact.
Any of these items can point to critical shortcomings or inefficiencies in application and infrastructure design, or operational processes.
Note that there is no reference here to types of technology or their relative merits. Instead it’s focussed on probing business outcomes.
Software is now a high-performance discipline where the margins between winning and losing are getting finer. Serious athletes would not think twice about calling a coach if they wanted to up their game. Business is no different.
And of course, there is no getting away from the fact that software and cloud engineering is complex and fast moving. Investment in a health check by external experts will identify areas of weakness and enable timely remediation. There are natural investment or strategic events that would prompt this. For example, funding rounds or significant business-led initiatives such as a market pivot.
They don’t need to be long, costly or contentious. For an early-stage company, a relatively comprehensive analysis of architecture, systems and processes could be carried out in a few days. Presented and executed correctly, it should provide an opportunity for engineering teams to take stock, learn and grow.
Over 90% of software start-ups fail. For those that make it from start-up to scale-up, the odds of success are still stacked against them. Most will have to change course at least once before finding their product-market fit. Those that manage to climb the greasy pole will have taken their applications and platforms from MVPs to production to scaled operations — and kept current as underlying technologies evolve.
Engineering is just one part of what makes a business tick. But its centrality to success has grown significantly as buyers have become more tech savvy and competition has increased.
By asking the right questions at the right times and instigating regular health checks from appropriately skilled experts, this critical executional risk can be mitigated for the benefit of all stakeholders — customers, employees, management, and investors.