Tech debtis the off-balance sheet cost of technology work that needs to be done in the future.
Its not possible to completely move away from doing things the quick and dirty way in a startup.
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Here are four common ways startups pile up tech debt.
The ongoing customized work continued for a whole year.
A product cannot be customer-specific, but implementations can.
However, business owners often get lured by the initial prospects and do implementations instead of developing a product.
Demands from marquee customers often force them to add required features to the product quickly.
In fact, such offers make negotiating deadlines difficult, which results in startups cutting corners and taking shortcuts.
Startups typically have about 18 months to raise the next level of funding.
So spending more than a quarter on reworking would impede their chances of moving to the next funding level.
Adding new developers to the team to expedite rework is not a feasible option.
Lesson:Reworking a product to generalize features from customer-specific implementations could lose a quarter per year.
My product is stable, why change it?
Startups tend to get complacent when they have enough paying customers for their product in a particular domain.
They often leverage the first movers advantage to get initial momentum.
Then either direct or tangential competitors emerge and start nibbling at their market share.
But only focusing on making the product feature-rich can be a mistake.
Its important to ask if the foundation is good enough to accommodate these new feature additions.
For a software product, the foundation is its technology and architecture.
These two are not easily alterable.
If the burden of features is too much, the foundation might crumble.
The foundation is what makes scaling possible, or not.
Scaling the product is not just about handling volume; it also requires shipping features at a rapid pace.
In addition, developers dont want to work with obsolete technologies, which affects their productivity and lowers morale.
Another major deterrent that holds back startups from tech upgrading is ROI.
Businesses dont want to disrupt the usual flow if the paying customer influx is satisfactory.
I experienced this first hand while proposing a rewriting of the technology to a client.
Unfortunately, this company is now spending more time on reworking and hacks to keep the product stable.
We adopted open-source technology its future-proofed
Open-source is definitely a good option for startups.
In the initial days, startups worry mostly about their product and its ROI.
This is natural since a company at this stage typically doesnt have paying customers.
Some early-stage companies dont even have investors.
Under such circumstances, adopting a cost-effective measure is an expected move.
But to use open-source software, one has to continuously upgrade to newer versions as they release.
The process could consume significant man-months with dedicated teams.
This is a quarter of the entire financial year which for a startup, could be a deal-breaker.
If the company had upgraded in time, they would have faced only a two-week setback.
I have also seen projects where such implementations were not possible.
In one such instance, we were using the Broadleaf Commerce framework for an ecommerce marketplace.
When the upgrades for Broadleaf became available, they did not set aside time for it.
Companies that update open-source software on a regular basis also benefit in other ways.
Updated open-source frameworks come with a lot of built-in features, which are free.
By doing this, they ignore future technological challenges.
Engineering leaders should have complete know-how about NFRs, even in the case of selecting short-term solutions.
Its important to set aside separate time to handle tech debts that NFRs could pile up.
If this debt is not paid up in time, it will destabilize the architecture leading to complete re-architecting.
To elaborate on this aspect, let me share another real experience.
But with the influx of investments, the company expanded from a regional entity and became a national player.
An obvious outcome was an increase in the volume of data, which made managing the batch processing difficult.
Scaling fast to meet the requirement became a huge problem.
The bottom-line
The fate of startups and tech debts are intertwined.
This reality will impact the business outcome both in terms of product development and ROI.
Identifying future challenges and keeping your startup future-ready requires planning, discipline, and continuous effort.
Sowmyanarayan is currently leading teams for more than 25 startups to bring their vision to life.
