We often start building a company and the technology that a company delivers and it just kind of evolves over time. There’s a general idea of where it’s going, but we build features, options, integrations, and focus on aspects that allow us to acquire new customers. And that’s important. But we should ask ourselves a number of questions routinely.
I’ve long felt a good annual planning meeting (even in a company of two) helps us make sure that we aren’t just building out tons and tons of new features without spending some of our time working on the foundations of our products. If we do that, we will eventually slow down the development of new features. Aging technology, or technical debt, can also become a liability as security problems crop up in libraries or services that don’t get patched.
The technology covered in that annual review often comes in a variety of themes for web applications. Namely around getting smaller and smaller services that can be more easily and economically hosted, that can then be more easily developed as the application grows, additional logic is added, etc. The questions posed in this article are meant to provide a good starting point for that annual review for earlier stage startups – and maybe even for some larger organizations as well.
To read the checklist, see https://www.bootstrappers.mn/post/evaluating-our-technology-stack.